St. John’s Book Club Read of the Month – Precious Bane

Thursday, June 15 at 6:30 PM

Join us for our monthly Book Club meeting to discuss another wonderfully-penned novel. All are welcome, so please invite your friends.

A compelling story of passion, with an enduring air of enchantment throughout, Precious Bane is a novel that haunts us with its beauty and its timeless truths about our deepest hopes. Set in Shropshire in the 1800s, it is alive with the many moods of Nature, benevolent and violent and the many moods — equally benevolent and violent — of the people making lives there.

Rebecca West, a contemporary of Mary Webb, called her, simply, “a genius,” and G. K. Chesterton, another contemporary, asserted: “the light in the stories . . . is a light not shining on the things but through them.”

Critic Hilda Addison summed up Precious Bane: “The book opens with one of those simple sentences which haunt the mind until the curiosity has been satisfied . . . It strikes a note which never fails throughout; it opens with a beauty which is justified to the last sentence.”

When the book was first published in 1926 in America, the New York Times Book Review predicted: ” on some bookshelves, we feel sure, Precious Bane will find almost a hallowed place.”