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by Mary Webb
A full introduction has been written for this website by Gladys Mary Coles, President of the Mary Webb Society.
Mary Webb's third novel, The house in Dormer Forest, was conceived towards the close of the Great War, written during the immediate post-war period 1918-19, and first published in July 1920. Today this book seems remarkably modern: the themes it embodies, the truths it expresses, the situations it dramatises are of essential relevance.
Here Mary Webb takes further her exploration of themes and questions embarked on in her preceding novel, Gone to earth (1917). Both books express implicitly her response to the devastation and horror of the Great War, her criticism of the civilised world with its religious and social conventions. But while Gone to earth is an impassioned plea and protest against human cruelty and hypocrisy, offering no clear answers, The house in Dormer Forest is a zestful diagnosis which probes a solution, attempts to show a way. Lively, ironic, sharp and humorous, it is less a rural novel than a social one, and is her most populated book. The emphasis is on human relationships, the action centred in and around a large country house in Shropshire and its ancestral family. Mary Webb concentrates on the interaction between people, examining in particular the inimical pressure of society on the individual striving to develop his inner self.
The upheaval of the old order, beginning before the First World War, was enormously accelerated by it: after the wave of joy and relief following the armistice had died away, the mood was one of reaction, a radical questioning of the validity of long-standing social structures, inherited values, codes, creeds; writers and artists were giving expression to this critical scrutiny and the resultant search. The house in Dormer Forest reflects this climate of opinion.
Setting her novel in the Edwardian period, Mary Webb looks closely and incisively at society in microcosm, as represented by the household of the Darkes. This family, gentry with a long lineage, live claustrophobically in their ancestral country mansion, Dormer Old House, situated 'low by the water' in the 'cuplike valley' of Dormer, surrounded on all sides by steep forest.
In the older members of the Darke family she created a memorable group of grotesques. The older Darkes are human extensions of their gloomy, oppressive mansion overspread with a 'spider's web of rules, legends and customs', potent in influence, demanding conformity from generations of Darkes. In effect, Dormer Old House is itself a protagonist, taking a major part in the action. Like Poe's House of Usher, it has gothic qualities--foreboding, often mist-swathed, a place of ticking clocks and death-watch beetle.
Structurally the book is divided into two parts--Book One: The House, Book Two: The Forest--significant titles which, like the allegoric names, are suggestive of what is really vital in the novel. Dormer Old House and its Beast Walk represent aspects of society that shackle the spirit, while the Forest, with its Upper Woods and Birds' Orchard, represents the freedom of external nature, indifferent to man yet not hampering, a potential source of spiritual nourishment where his awakened soul can grow.
In the opening chapter the setting is put before us in a rich, intense evocation reminiscent of Hardy's presentation of Egdon Heath at the start of The return of the native. Mary Webb is a consummate story-teller, and the book comes vividly to life in the second chapter, with which the narrative really begins. The story concerns the various rebellions against Dormer of the younger Darkes, the four grown children of Solomon and Rachel: Amber, the eldest, her brothers Jasper and Peter, and sister Ruby, all fully rounded major characters who struggle against Dormer's power and repression.
In her exposition of this 'drama of the spirit', Mary Webb writes with great verve and sureness of touch: the novel is imbued with her own vitality at the time of composition. She gives vent to her lively sense of fun and comedy in a novel brimming with life, exercising thoroughly what the critic Edwin Pugh (a personal friend) called her 'inborn gifts of inimitable wit and humour'. With sharp, adroit strokes of observation she builds up her satiric portrayals of the older Darkes and the obnoxious curate Ernest Swyndle; and through finely authentic dialogue and action she presents a rich assortment of lesser characters with their variety of human foibles and facets. Some of the keenly incised comic scenes are unforgettable--for instance, Ernest's marriage proposal in the vestry, ridiculously and unknowingly accompanied by blue-bottles 'crawling, so tight and well found, that they looked as if they wore cassocks'; or the hectic wedding preparations and dance at Dormer (a human interplay woven with enormous relish).
Mary Webb gives us, in Amber Darke, a self-portrait: this is the younger Mary as she was in her twenties and before her marriage (at thirty-one). She depicts in Amber her own 'little goblin of humour' (often 'irrepressible'), her passionate love of nature, her intensity, sense of physical inferiority and lack of confidence, her fierce compassion and, not least, her mysticism (the highly charged descriptions of Amber's mystical communion with nature sprang directly from her own experience).
At another level in this novel, Mary Webb grapples with the question of class and the rigidity of class barriers at a time when the 'big house' and its gentry were dominant over an entire country district. The upstairs-downstairs life at Dormer Old House is particularly well drawn.
Central in her canon, The house in Dormer Forest marks a mid-way point in Mary Webb's career as a novelist and a turning-point in her personal life.
Readers today will undoubtedly be more attuned to this important novel than the critics were in 1920. Though less of an artistic success than Precious bane, nonetheless The house in Dormer Forest is a major achievement, rich in essential truths of human experience and possibility.
Here, Mary Webb's primary theme is both timeless and universally relevant as she speaks for the individual, for the awakening of that 'conscious entity' within, and she demonstrates that our humanity must not be subservient to codes, systems, creeds. There is no exaggeration in her view of the dark side of civilised life.
But Mary Webb set out to entertain as well as instruct--this she does in a novel spiced with ironic wit and invested with a depth of symbolic meaning.
© Gladys Mary Coles, 2003
A sample chapter of The house in Dormer Forest is available to view or download by following this link.
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Page created 21 January 2003 and last
updated 21 January 2003
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