Biography of Mary Webb

Mary Webb Collection: Biography of Mary Webb

About the Collection

Finding Aid

Mary Webb (1881-1927) was a British author whose novels and poems are imbued with a sensitive connection to nature and a spirit of mysticism. She was born Mary Gladys Meredith and spent much of her childhood in Shropshire, near Shrewsbury.  She married Henry B.L. Webb, a school teacher, in 1912.  Though the couple spent some time in London in an effort to promote Mary's career, she was always happiest and most productive when living in Shropshire. Readers will recognize many Shropshire locales in Webb's novels.

Despite positive reviews, Mary Webb's work was relatively unknown during her short life. Her greatest fame occurred after her death, when the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin publicly praised her novel Precious Bane, for which she had received the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse in 1926.  Jonathan Cape immediately published Mary Webb's collected works; her husband edited an anthology of her work and published it in 1939. Her novels were reprinted and became best sellers.

Mary Webb's popularity waned with the start of the second world war, but interest in her work was renewed during the 1970s with the publication of two biographies and a volume of previously unpublished works.

Her mystical descriptions of nature and her deeply emotional character portrayals are made more poignant by the tragedy of her early death. Mary Webb's final novel, Armour Wherein he Trusted, was left unfinished at her death from complications from Graves' Disease.    

A pen and ink sketch of Mary Webb's cottage at Hampstead by Fred Adcock, showing a shaded house with a picket fence.  From the Mary Webb Collection.