Precious Bane

The book for July is Precious Bane by Mary Webb.  

Set in the remote hill country of Shropshire at the time of the Napoleonic wars, Mary Webb's classic novel tells a story of superstition and hatred, of destructive ambition, and, most of all, of the strength of love.  Precious Bane was a best-seller of the 1920s.

Precious Bane is the story told by Prudence Sarn.  Afflicted with a "hare-shotten lip," feared and scorned as a witch, Prue Sarn nonetheless possesses a passionate heart and a clarity of sight.  She loves and sees the remote countryside that is her home with a descerning, mystical vision; and she also, hopelessly it seems, loves Kester Woodseaves, the weaver.

Yet Prue is bound to her brother, Gideon Sarn, the sin-eater.  A distraught and driven man, Gideon is cut off from human contact and from the beauty of the natural world by his love of profit, by his hunger to make his farm produce.  And he has made Prue promise to work with him toward an end she does not want-an end that may destroy them both.

Thus Prue is torn between loyalty to her brother and love for the weaver.  In turn, Kester Woodseaves' steady love for all created things leads him to resist people's destructive cruelty toward nature and each other; and his love for Prue Sarn enables him to discern, beneath her blighted appearance, the natural loveliness of his "dear acquaintance."  

Precious Bane tells the story of these several loves, of their conflict-and consummation.

Summary taken from1980 publication of Precious Bane.

I wasn't sure who had what publication but mine had a really insightful introduction by author Erika Duncan.  If you don't have it in your book, I've taken the liberty (hopefully not too much liberty) to scan in my introduction.  I had no idea how many treasure this story.  After reading it I was really excited to dive into Precious Bane.  

See you all next month!

(Click pages to enlarge)

June's Meeting

Thanks to Shelley for hosting June's gathering. We had a good turnout and the cheese and cookies were yummy.

Here's a few of my thoughts regarding the book.

While nonfiction, it read like a story. It was compelling. It was sad. It was gross (you who have read it know what I'm talking about).

Dr. Minor (the madman who contributed so incredibly to the dictionary) suffered acutely for many years in confinement. His nights were filled with the torture of hallucinations, paranoia, and fear. Treatment for his mental illness was largely absent, and so his work on the dictionary became his therapy.

In the words of the author:

One must feel a sense of gratitude, then, that his treatment was never good enough to divert him from his work. The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He  was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.

While I loved learning about the backgrounds of the two men the book is about, and how their lives prepared them to work on the writing of the OED, my favorite part of the book was the third character: the OED itself.

It's no secret that I love books. And with that love of books and reading has come a love of words. I love to learn new words and use proper (though often uncommon) pronunciation. I like the subtleties of meaning and how words evolve over time. This book helped me understand that language is almost an organic entity. It lives, changes, grows, and some parts of it even die. 

I found the process by which the OED was written to be fascinating. How the language's most comprehensive dictionary could have been compiled in a time before computers. The sheer magnitude of the task is boggling. The men who made it happen are geniuses, and we are indebted to them whether we realize it or not. 

Winchester sums it up thus:

It was the heroic creation of a legion of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, just as lives the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait.