Precious Bane

A Shropshire farm girl born with a hare lip is treated as a witch by the parish while her brother sacrifices everything, including her, to his hunger for land. Mary Webb wrote in the Shropshire dialect and was almost unread until the prime minister praised her at a public dinner six months after she died. Fifty-six plates of farm carts, cattle and riverside meadows, from Constable to Ommeganck, give the rural world Mary Webb wrote about in its own colours.