Shropshire Haunts of Mary Webb

2nd edition.  102pp, with black and white illustrations.  Quarter bound in red cloth over tan cloth-covered boards, titles on label on front panel. Maps on endpapers  8vo.  Boards rubbed all round edges, rounded on corners and spine ends.  Internally pages are a little toned, with some signs of fingering throughout.  In its original paper dust jacket, worn and torn, chipped all round edges, quite heavily shelf worn.

Mary Webb (1881-1927)  was a famous English novelist and poet.  She was born in the pretty Shropshire village of Leighton and began to write poems at a young age before taking up journalistic work.  She wrote from the Shropshire villages where she lived with her family and later her husband, Henry Webb, a Shropshire schoolmaster whom she married in Meole Brace in 1912.  Her first book was The Joy of Spring but it was her first novel, The Golden Arrow, published in 1916 which attracted attention. It was rapidly followed by Gone to Earth (1917), The House in Dormer Forest (1920), Seven for a Secret (1922) and one of her greatest books, Precious Bane in 1924.  Webb knew Shropshire and the Welsh Marches, its people and its legends, weaving them into her novels.