Precious Bane

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Precious Bane is a novel by Mary Webb, first published in 1924. It won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse Prize. In 1957 it was made into a six-part BBC television drama series starring Patrick Troughton and Daphne Slater. Under its French title 'Sarn', it was produced as a television play by French Television ORTF in 1968, with Dominique Labourier as Prue, Josep Maria Flotats as Gedeon and Pierre Vaneck as Kester; the director was Claude Santelli. In 1989 it was again adapted for British television by the BBC, directed by Christopher Menaul and starring Clive Owen and Janet McTeer.

Synopsis

The story is set in rural Shropshire shortly after the Napoleonic Wars}. It is narrated by the central character, Prue Sarn, whose life is blighted by having a harelip. Only the weaver, Kester Woodseaves, perceives the beauty of her character, but Prue cannot believe herself worthy of him. Her brother Gideon is overridingly ambitious to attain wealth and power, regardless of who suffers while he does so. Gideon is set to wed his sweetheart Jancis, but he incurs the wrath of her father, the cruel and scheming self-proclaimed wizard Beguildy. An act of vengeance by Beguildy makes Gideon reject Jancis and tragedy overwhelms them both. Prue is wrongly accused of murder and set upon by a mob, but Kester defies them and carries Prue away to the happiness she believed she could never possess because of her harelip. The setting for the story has been attributed to the Meres of northern Shropshire, but is more likely to have been the area around Bomere and Shomere pools, Shrewsbury and the author's own home at Spring Cottage on Lyth Hill. These locations were much more rural at the time the novel was written, and Mary Webb was herself very much part of the rural scene there in the 1920's.

The title of the story is from John Milton's Paradise Lost:

Let none admire

That riches grow in Hell; that Soyle may best

Deserve the precious bane.

It refers to the love of money, which, as Prue records, blights love and destroys life.

External links

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Digital file copyright belongs to Shropshire County Library Service (the actual novel is now public domain in the UK and elsewhere).

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