Gone to Earth
A Tragic Pastoral Romance of Shropshire, Nature Mysticism, and Forbidden Desire

Beschreibung
Mary Webb's Gone to Earth is a tragic pastoral romance set in the Shropshire countryside, centred on Hazel Woodus, a wild, instinctive young woman whose kinship with animals and the natural world places her at odds with human law, marriage, and desire. Written in a richly lyrical, symbolic prose, the novel fuses rural realism with visionary intensity. Its landscapes are not mere settings but moral and spiritual forces, aligning Webb with Hardy while preserving her own mystical, folkloric sensibility. Mary Gladys Meredith Webb knew Shropshire intimately, and her fiction grew from close observation of its speech, customs, woods, and fields. Ill health, religious questioning, and a profound sympathy for vulnerable creatures shaped her imagination. In Hazel's divided fate-between the sensual squire Jack Reddin and the gentle minister Edward Marston-Webb dramatizes conflicts between instinct and doctrine, freedom and possession, nature and society. Gone to Earth is recommended for readers drawn to psychologically charged rural fiction, ecological feeling, and prose of unusual poetic density. It is a haunting novel: passionate, strange, and deeply compassionate, rewarding those who appreciate literature in which landscape, character, and tragedy are inseparably entwined.