#precious bane

[chanelbagsandcigarettedrags]

To conjure, even for a moment, the wistfulness which is the past is like trying to gather in one's arms the hyacinthine colour of the distance.

Precious Bane, Mary Webb

[lohtulauluja]

from Precious Bane (Mary Webb)

[105nt]

My 2022 in books

With my kids a little older and a lot more into their own stuff, I have had a good run. These are all the books I read for the first time this year in reverse order (I've not yet finished with The Time Traveller's Wife):

The books I enjoyed most in 2022:

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue A hotpot of motherhood, abuse and atonement - in which science comes head to head with faith and both succeeds and fails. I was impressed by the way the story gives weight to every consideration - Anna's autonomy, Ireland's suffering, the duties and limits of love. Outstanding.

Normal People by Sally Rooney I came to this having loved the TV version, and I wasn't disappointed. A very raw, and very true, portrait of what it is like to live and love, and how that differs from what we're told to expect.

Precious Bane by Mary Webb I'd been planning to read some Mary Webb for some time, but it was never top of my reading pile. Then I read a biography that reignited my interest, when I found she once occupied a house about 100 yards from my back door, and I found an old cloth copy which I liked the feel of more than the paperback I'd already bought. I thought I knew what I was getting from Precious Bane - everyone knows that the heroine has a cleft lip which she feels sets her apart in solitude, and that the book abounds with rustic scenes, homilies and events, and that there will be a handsome man who will choose her. I'd read Cold Comfort Farm the year before, and so in some sense had already laughed at Precious Bane before opening it. I was not expecting it to be littered with events that were genuinely shocking and dramatic, or to be convinced by the romantic ending, but I was. I really felt it managed to transcend the fun that is poked at it.

The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith I've been totally absorbed by Strike for nearly two years now. A lot of people didn't rate IBH but it arrives and takes its place in my top five with flick of its strawberry-blond mane. I was expecting another book like Troubled Blood - meaty, satisfying, layered ... I am back to hotpots again (must be the weather) but I spent the whole week I managed to stretch this over on the edge of my seat; disturbed and fascinated, wanting to be drawn in and pampered the way I had been with TB, but constantly having the rug pulled from under me. I will never forgive her for killing the sofa.    

Shuggie Bane by Douglas Stuart It's a rare skill to keep your reader wanting a happy ending long after it's clearly hopeless and yet make them unable to abandon the story. Douglas Stuart has that skill. He's a dangerous man and should be on a list somewhere.

A few other things:

My least favourite book was Worst. Idea. Ever. by Jane Fallon. I just can't ... I don't get it. Please. Someone. Explain.

My favourite audiobook this year was The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex. I'd never listened to an audiobook before and, to put it mildly, this was a good start. I also listened to all the Strike novels 1-6, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Count of Monte Cristo, Dracula, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and The Iliad. I go for the classics in a big way because 1. they are free, and 2. they go well with the ironing.

If I could only have had one of these reading experiences, it would have to be The Ink Black Heart. 

[rherlotshadow]

'If you should ask what manner of young man would I choose, I'd say as he'd wear a coat the colour of a May meadow.'

[tatiplaytime]

One of Clive’s first screen roles called Precious Bane from 1989. His character is cruel and ambitious whose sister has a harelip.

Forgive the fogginess of the screen caps; I kind of like them.

[lackadaisycal-art]

Y'all ever walk through the forest feeling miserably sure that you're totally romantically undesirable but find solace in the beauty of the countryside where you grew up and think damn Prue Sarn had a point

[jupitermelichios]

I feel like not enough people on this site know about Cold Comfort Farm...

It’s a book by an author called Stella Gibbons, who exclusively wrote pisstakes of other better known authors’ work, except that Cold Comfort got really popular and now way more people remember it than remember Precious Bane by Mary Webb, which it is a spoof of.

The book is about Flora Post, who’s parents die and leave her not much to live on. She decides that working is for schmucks, and she’s going to sponge off her relatives for a living, so she writes to every relative she can find asking them to take her in, and goes to live with the ones who send the most interesting response.

They turn out to be the Starkadder family of Cold Comfort Farm, who exist in a constant state of high level Gothic melodrama. There’s a mad grandmother who lives in the attic and watches everyone, father’s got religion and mother’s got depression. Poor Rennet throws herself down the well at regular intervals because she’s been disappointed in love, the daughter is feral and probably fae, the maid gets pregnant every time the sukebind flowers, and the whole place exists in a state of dramatic chaos, teetering on the edge of murder and ruin.

Flora decides that while all this is very interesting, it’s also frankly unnecessary and set about organizing everyone and generally improving everybody’s lives by virtue of being the only sane person any of the Starkadders have ever met.

It’s hilarious, and hugely quotable, and honestly the Starkadders are all deeply relatable.

Also Judith has the line: “Anyone may do anything as long as I am left alone with my sorrows.” which is a fucking mood.

If you’re not into reading, there’s a pretty good movie adaptation staring Ian McKellen, and a fantastic radio drama version, and an audiobook I loved as a child but have found is now almost impossible to get hold of. (It’s the Anna Massey version, if you’re lucky enough to find a copy).

[thebyrchentwigges]

it’s time: Precious Bane

In the 1920s, a Regency-setting drama and romance novel, Precious Bane, won the Prix Femina - Vie Heuresie prize. At the time it was celebrated for its lush rural setting; its sympathetic, articulate heroine; and edgy-for-the-1920s sexuality. It was adapted to multiple stage plays, a musical, and two BBC series.

It’s as ripe and scenery-chewing as Lady Audley’s Secret or The Shuttle. One-third Mills and Boon tropes, one-third Thomas Hardy, and one-third its own potent brew of sin-eaters and sinners, wizards and magical quackery, ghosts and murders, and romanticised retrosexuality.

When every Regency romance with historic provenance is being strip-mined to appeal to Austen fans, why haven’t you heard about it?

Maybe because the heroine, Prue Sarn, has a cleft lip.

Precious Bane seems to be making a comeback after a 30-year hiatus from the public discourse. I stumbled upon it when I was researching cleft lip/cleft palate for a character and was surprised that, as a long-ago English major, I’d never heard of it before.

Lately, I’ve seen these phrases floating around on Tumblr: let girls be ugly and strange. let monster women look monstrous. Since 1924, Precious Bane has been showing how difficult this is for audiences and adapters. The book covers and illustrations are worth a thousand words:

Spoilerrific discussion and images behind the cut...

Precious Bane is the story of Prue Sarn, a woman living in rural England during the Napoleonic wars. Trapped in a life of hard labour, like other women around her, she stands out by seeking to better herself with reading, writing, and supporting her drama-firestorm family and friends. Oh - and people are prejudiced against her because she has a cleft lip.

What’s good about the book? Prue Sarn makes Elizabeth Bennet look like a cardboard cutout. Her voice is so lyrical that we believe in her and are cheering for her. Prue is intelligent, devoted, and shelters both a romantic heart and her own sexuality. The story also has the appeal of historic trappings - best dresses and ringlets, thee and thou, hard work and rural comforts now “on trend” as hygge. The action is compelling, with that hard-to-put-down quality.

What’s bad? The rural cant, dialed up to 11 by author Webb, can be wince-inducing. Pretty much everything that happens to Prue’s pretty friend/Beguildy’s daughter/Gideon’s fiancee, Jancis. It’s also awful to see how Prue is treated - though it is, I’m sorry to say, historically accurate. The scene where a group of overexcited rural girls go on for pages about the charms of Kester the weaver is unintentionally hilarious.

The novel reels with high drama. The fire-brimstone-and-cheapskatery of the Sin Eater funeral fiasco. The time Prue takes another woman’s place in a false magic ritual and impersonates the goddess Venus - without knowing that Kester, who she has a crush on, will also be there. The rural engagement celebrated with a ‘love-spinning’ where all is innuendo, cake, and more innuendo. Men doing atrocious things. Kester standing up against animal cruelty and replacing a bull in a bull-baiting - Prue goes totally badass and saves him when things go wrong. Prue’s brother Gideon descending into haunted madness after betraying the woman he loves, and Prue finding out what happens when she loses his protection. In between are descriptions of ravishing countryside and a soaring or demolished woman’s heart and mind. After you finish, you’re going to want to amble on a long country walk to a pond, make saffron sponge cakes, and punch Regency men in the face.

As literature, Precious Bane is somewhere between historical and romance, mentioned in lists of Victorian books despite being published in 1924 and set during the British Regency. Eloise Millar describes how the book strikes her as a modern reader, and I agree with her - though I’ve got something to add.

Much about Precious Bane echoes classic monster narratives. Closeness to nature, hand in hand with a sense of nature and power gone wrong: associations with animals: an aware or pained outsider trapped by an othered body and a cruel society. Prue’s cleft lip means she is seen as grotesque and repeatedly accused of witchcraft. The difference from the classic monster narrative of fascination, confrontation, and destruction comes because Prue is part of human society.

Until the final scene, Prue’s cleft lip binds her to her local community, where people know her, and to her brother Gideon. For his profound flaws - ambition, greed for wealth and power, abuse of his sexual appeal, and What He Does to his mother - he stands by Prue when others mock her, even rejecting the advances of the local squire’s daughter. He also strings her along in multiple ways, including her wish to have her cleft lip treated, with magic or medicine.

Prue is perceived by most around her as monstrous: in our discourse today we would call her disabled (and see her treatment as so necessary that many charities focus on cleft repair.) The excellent romance novel blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books has a thread on disabled heroines, although someone notes halfway through: “I’m really not thrilled with the pattern I’m seeing here. I have read so many historicals with PTSD, scarred-up, limbs chopped off heroes, and okay, it’s not like that many women were at Waterloo, but *still*.” In the book, two things bring Prue to the attention of Kester, who comes to love her: fearless violence when she saves his life and gentle literacy over the longer term. He inverts perceptions of her with constant lines like, “If you’re ever wanting an angel’s situation, you can send to me for a written character.”

The ending scene is as over the top romantic as can be. Prue is swept away from a vengeful mob onto a horse by Kester, eager to take her away from all that. The novel closes on their dramatic, accepting kiss, having made it very clear that a smart, nice woman with a cleft lip is the least of Shropshire’s problems.

It’s had television adaptations in 1957, 1963 (French), and 1989 (full-on BBC Masterpiece Theatre.) There are also lots of stage renditions. Prue is often depicted with shy, cringing body language and wild hair, to “other” her further.

At least the BBC let Prue have her best clothes and ringlets when the action calls for it. Curiously, the BBC series from 1989 isn’t available on DVD, despite its feminist tone and requests to make it available. The first image is a between-scenes moment with the much-praised Janet McTeer fooling around on a smoke break. For a great breakdown of a scene from this that shows amazing body language, see The Silver Petticoat’s post on a favorite romantic moment from the film.

Precious Bane was one of the direct inspirations for Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbon’s successful parody of Webb’s “loam and lovechild” literature. There’s so much to satirize in Prue’s brother Gideon that it takes Gibbons two characters to do it, farming-obsessed Reuben and oversexed Seth. But even Gibbons can’t resist the tropetastic ending of Precious Bane for her own heroine, Flora. Flora, too, is swept away from loam and limitations with another dramatic kiss and escape-from-it-all ride. (Alex Waterhouse-Hayward illustration of Prue’s finale below - as with most covers of the book, we don’t get to see anyone’s face.)

It’s been almost a hundred years since Precious Bane came out and it remains a rarity. Prue Sarn is still nearly unique as a character with a cleft lip who isn’t a child or a villain. In her tale, a girl seen as monstrous rescues someone, and is rescued herself. A woman stigmatized for her appearance gets a passionate Happy Ever After ending.