Some stories call immediate and insistent attention to the teller
; as we read, the novelist seems the chief character in the book. This is remarkably true of Mary Webb. Indeed, ft is impossible to read Precious Bane without feeling acute curiosity about her. Mrs. Addison's Min Webb. A Short Story of' /ter Life and Work (Cecil Palmer, 5s.) will be received. with interest by her many admirers. She is presented to us as a very unusual character, somewhat reminiscent of the Brontës, despite the fact that in youth " she lived in comfort in a home of books, flowers, companionship, and adequate domestic help." Later on as.a married woman " gentle yet tenaciously stubborn " in disposition, she developed a queer form of stoicism, refusing all the ease which sufficient income offered her. " She guarded the privacy of her home jealously, and strongly resented the notion of others living and working in what was exclusively her own." With an insatiable energy which reminds us other hero Gideon Sarn she worked upon the land, cultivating vegetables and flowers, and sold theiji herself standing " carelessly dressed " by her own stall in, Shrewsbury market: Probably this experience helped her to produce that very artistic amalgam of rural realism and sophisticated fancy, which charms the literary public. Mrs: Addison, while extolling her genius and recounting many detached details of her life, has not, succeeded in giving her readers any sense of intimacy with Mary Webb. She remains a stranger, but one about whom we would gladly know more.
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