Review by John S:
The initial chapters of Mary Webb’s ‘The House in Dormer Forest’ are mildly entertaining. The novel is set in melancholy surroundings in rural Shropshire. Most of the leading characters are members of an extended family (and their servants), cooped up in a spooky old house. The grandmother and the loopy, ingratiating curate are particularly funny. Amber, the heroine, however, is dull and dreamy. The illustrator highlights the menacing aspects of several characters, including Enoch the handyman, together with the brooding atmosphere of house and forest.
Half way through the novel the tone switches from the Adams Family to Gossip Girl. One of the young men of the family starts carrying on with a servant girl. This scandalous behaviour releases a tide of suppressed passion, as others in the house, including Amber, begin their own search for love and fulfilment. I gave up shortly afterwards (at p. 203), finding the sentiments of the lovers, as described by Mary Webb, to be cloying in the extreme. The novel might have returned to the rails later, but I could not steel myself to find out. In his foreword, H.R.L. Sheppard praises Mary Webb’s nature mysticism. The action is interspersed with ethereal descriptions of the countryside. Amber and the morose handyman have a strong spiritual connection to the forest. I imagine it to be raining all the time. Mary Webb’s indigestible account of the loves and hates of a group of unbalanced, possibly inbred individuals, trapped in a claustrophobic rural hell, cannot have done much for Shropshire tourism.
Reading 1900-1950 
It is very hard to read Mary Webb now, except through the prism of Cold Comfort Farm. I read several of her books as a way of understanding what Stella Gibbons was parodying, and actually became rather absorbed in Webb’s melodramas, I enjoyed The House in Dormer Forest, despite the rain and sentiment, and I certainly could not have abandoned the story half way through. I think you have to be in the right mood for them – and since you describe them as ‘indigestible’, I’d agree that it’s best not to try to swallow a whole one … FayeH
Several other members of the reading group read Mary Webb, so it will be interesting to see if they share John’s response. Certainly someone else who took two Mary Webb novels emailed to say she is approaching the second with some dread!
I managed one and a half pages of Gone To Earth before I gave up. It was just so horrendously written, especially after having read Cold Comfort Farm.
Living here in the area of Shropshire where they are set – the south western corner – down the years I have read all of Mary Webb’s completed novels. At the end of each, and here employing a farming metaphor, I have found myself feeling very much how I imagine a farm labourer, who has just completed ploughing a field of heavy clay soil, might feel: exhausted!
All bar perhaps one of the novels are exceptionally hard going and by today’s standards, they are all very dated. One wonders if they were ever anything else., Most of the characters are completely unbelievable and the plots utterly ridiculous. The best is undoubtedly “Precious Bane” which I have read several times; all the others but once.
I visited Shropshire in my fifties, discovered Mary Webb, and find myself very much on her wavelength. I have studied literature all my life and read most of the rural novelists, I think, over the years, some for an English BA Degree. I think the depth of her connection with nature makes her work unique as a novelist (only certain poets have approach it), and those who denigrate or find her work uninspiring, look to yourselves. Is it Mary Webb who cannot write, or yourself as a reader that cannot see? Her work was revelatory to me. I love Thomas Hardy, but it is plain that he had little spiritual apprehension of the countryside. He was no mystic, though his poetry comes closer than his novels. It is to Mary Webb that I keep returning, just as I return to the countryside itself, and the more powerful the sympathy, the less it can be described. So many writers are great with romance, human relationships, character development, pacing, narrative structure, etc, etc, and I can see how a lot of people would point at flaws in these terms in the work of Mary Webb, and enjoy the parodies, but please forgive me if I call you poor fools. She transcends all those considerations, just as humans do, when spiritually awake. Humph. I waste my time here. The sun is on the hillside, clouds pass, as MW said ‘with breathtaking majesty’ and I’m gone.
Thank you Marc for this comment on and appreciation of Mary Webb. I ought to say that all our reviews are very much personal views – there is no Reading 1900-1950 party-line on Mary Webb or any other writers – our aim is to remember and debate writers and novels who/ which were once famous. We often disagree politely with one another about their merits – best Chris.