Mary Webb’s legacy: curse or coincidence?

Stella Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm as an antidote to and comic parody of a certain type of fiction: the rural novel as written by authors such as Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. 

I have never been able to see the attraction of what is known as the ‘Loam and Lovechild School of Fiction’ myself  - not even Thomas Hardy’s books have the power to hold my attention – but when I read in an article I found online while researching Stella Gibbons that Stella once expressed her regret to the writer Michael Pick that she had parodied Mary Webb "because she had such an unhappy life", followed by “This was perhaps oversensitive. Webb had, after all, died five years before the publication of Cold Comfort Farm. Her life, though dogged by illness and depression, was by no means without happiness, and her childhood, compared with Stella's, had been idyllic”, I became curious about Mary Webb and decided to investigate further. 

I read the biographies The Flower of Light and Mary Webb, both by Gladys Mary Coles, and the novel Precious Bane, which is generally considered to be Mary Webb’s masterpiece.  

I found some familiar scenarios in Precious Bane; I decided to produce this article after reading about what happened to Mary Webb’s husband after her death.

Unseen crimes: an introduction

It is now quite common to hear people use expressions such as 'dysfunctional family' and 'control freak'. Energy vampires (people not appliances) are following the same path towards general recognition: there is a lot of useful information about them available in books and online.

It is now the turn of unseen crimes to go public. These are not crimes in the legal sense; they are committed by people who operate from another dimension in such a way that their activities cannot be detected or linked to the perpetrator. 

Such crimes are the hidden cause of some runs of bad luck; they may be behind misfortunes, accidents, injuries, illnesses and even deaths. The perpetrators are usually completely unaware of what they are doing and how it affects people: they never make the connection between what has been going on in their minds and what is happening to people around them. 

Someone who did such things deliberately would be considered to be practising black magic; the people who do it unconsciously can be said to be performing psychological black magic, psychic crime or mind-power crime. The motives vary: for example, it can be done in revenge, as a punishment, in self-defence, in an attempt to influence the victim or as a pretext to approach someone.