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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.
The Spring of joy was Mary Webb's first prose work. Although written in her early twenties, it was not published until some fifteen years later, in 1917, when, with two novels in print, she was already established as a writer. This nature book--a remarkable if little-known aspect of Mary Webb's achievement will be a discovery to those today who know her only as a novelist and poet. Small masterpieces of nature writing, these nine related essays place Mary Webb in a direct line of literary descent from Gilbert White and Izaac Walton down to Richard Jefferies, W.H. Hudson and Edward Thomas (with whom she has several affinities).
The essays were first written in 1902-3 during her convalescence from the onset of Graves' Disease, a then incurable thyroid disorder which had struck her at the age of twenty, bringing many months of severe suffering, both physical and emotional (and ultimately one of the causes of her death at forty-six). Cut off by illness from nature, specifically from the beloved Shropshire countryside she had known since birth, which had moulded her and was essential to her being, she turned to prose writing to express all that she had received from this intimate union with the natural world--'a place of almost unbearable wonder'. Previously she had tried to express her feeling for nature in poetry: now she found scope for her descriptive power in the essays which became The Spring of joy. Pouring out long-stored observations, perceptions and thoughts, her intention was to give back something of the 'enchantment' she had found, to share her spiritual discoveries and guide others along her proven ways to renewal and wholeness, for this was primarily A little book of healing. Mary Webb, having suffered intensely herself, desired ever after to be a healer.
Devastated by the death of her father in January 1909, she experienced a prolonged period of grief and desolation during which Graves' Disease reasserted its hold. In 1909-10, struggling to recover from her loss, she turned again to the essays with their declaration of faith in the healing power of nature, her own directives to joy. Revising them in 1910, she sent them to publishers under the title The scallop shell (taken from Sir Walter Raleigh's poem The pilgrimage). Although the quality of the writing was praised, it was not accepted for publication and the disappointed unknown writer Mary Meredith put aside her first prose work.
It is significant that this Little book of healing was eventually published in 1917 during the First World War. Mary Webb, whose three brothers were at the Western Front, was acutely affected by the war. Then a published novelist, she slightly revised her essays, retitled them The Spring of joy and sent them to J.M. Dent & Sons. They were published on 4 October, 1917.
In The Spring of joy Mary Webb's central theme is made clear in the opening essay, Vis Medicatrix Naturae; the healing power of nature is a 'spiritual healing'. Beauty, Joy and Laughter are her touchstones: these 'are necessities of our being, and nature brims with them' as she shows us in her explorations of nature's music, motion, form, shadow and colour. She is particularly concerned for those who are physically circumscribed (as she herself had been), whose surroundings are restricted in scope. With conviction she declares:
'No accident of environment or circumstance need cut us off from Nature. . . .It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small account in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life. ...One violet is as sweet as an acre of them.'...
Although her insistence is on union with natural life, it is not her intention to write about the grandeur and majesty of great views but to point out the 'minute miracles' at our door and accessible to everybody, and the evanescent detail or moment that suggests a season or the whole cycle. She leads us into her own 'green world' which could be any small area of the British countryside--or even the gardens and lanes of a leafy suburb.
Mary Webb urges us to follow pure intuition, that 'sudden sense--keen and startling--of oneness with all beauty, seen and unseen': an influx of essential life, joy and vitality will then sweep 'into those recesses of being beyond the conscious self'; so the person 'who holds direct intercourse with the cosmic life through his heart and mind has a purpose in waking each morning, a reason for existing--he clings to the beauty of earth as to a garment, and he feels that the wearer of the garment is God.'
The Spring of joy contains some of Mary Webb's finest and most characteristic writing. As Walter de la Mare said: 'Mary Webb being a poet is always a poet when her interest reaches a certain creative intensity'. That she was also a naturalist is equally obvious from a glance at any page of her essays, which overflow with accurate and fascinating botanical detail. She was equipped with senses of 'microscopic keenness' (Martin Armstrong) and this is evident everywhere in The Spring of joy.
But Mary Webb is never merely descriptive: she shows us a world full of meaning.
This is a celebration of nature, its variety and secret orchestration. Mary Webb's observations and the experiences she shares with us are available to all who will, as she suggests, 'dare to be merely receptive'; and they are as relevant today as when she wrote, more so perhaps, as in this increasingly technological and urban world with its mass-culture and synthetic stimuli it is ever more necessary to renew the springs of our being in relationship with our natural surroundings, to revitalise our senses and, especially, our sense of wonder--as Mary Webb says: 'In nature...life's values right themselves again.'
It is with much enthusiasm that I introduce The Spring of joy, not only because I am convinced that it deserves wider attention and recognition, but because as her biographer I consider these essays to be of fundamental importance, an essential key to an understanding of Mary Webb as a person and a writer: I can recommend no better or more direct way of knowing her inner self and personality.
© Gladys Mary Coles, 2002.
A sample essay, Populus tremula, is available on this website.
The full text of The Spring of joy can be read online or downloaded free of charge. It is in XHTML format, like this page. Please note the file size is 159kb and it may take some time to open-up if you choose to read it online. Downloading for reading later may be the preferred option and this can be typically achieved by calling up an option box. If you have a mouse and it is configured for left click to select, right clicking the link may give you this option. Link to the full text of The Spring of joy.
Page created 29 November 2002 and last
updated 29 November 2002
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