About Mary Webb
Mary Gladys Webb was an English romance novelist and poet of the early 20th century, whose work is set chiefly in the Shropshire countryside and among Shropshire characters and people whom she knew. Her novels have been successfully dramatized, most notably the film Gone to Earth in 1950 by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger based on the novel of the same title. Webb's first published writing was a five-verse poem, written on hearing news of the Shrewsbury rail accident in October 1907. She is considered to have created a fictional counterpart in the disfiguring harelip of Prue Sarn, the heroine of Precious Bane. They lived for a time in Weston-super-Mare, before moving back to Mary's beloved Shropshire, where they worked as market gardeners until Henry secured a job as a teacher, first at Chester, then at the Priory Grammar School for Boys in Shrewsbury.
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