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
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.
He had ever a very out-of-the-ornary voice. It was like as if, when he spoke, the sound of the speaking made the world new for itself, not caring about the old world. It was like a wide, blossomy thorn-tree on a sweltering day in early June. You could sit down under it and rest you. And it was like the still hearth-fire on a winter night, when wild Edric's out in the forest, and the curtains be close, candles snuffed, all fast, and the master of the house raught whome.
'Who be she?' he says. And even though it be only a passing thought and three words, I'm a flower that knows the sun.
Suddenly, along the quiet road, through the shadows, and through the mist on my own eyelashes, I saw somebody coming. A man, it was. And if there be any meaning in that word as I hanna thought on, let them that read put it in, Let them put the strength and the power, the kindness and the patience, the sternness and the stately righteousness of all good men in that word, and let him wear it. For it was himself, Kester Woodseaves, the maister.
