Precious Bane

Precious Bane is a novel by Mary Webb, first published in 1924. It won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse Prize.

In 1957 the book was made into a six-part BBC television drama series starring Patrick Troughton and Daphne Slater. Under its French title 'Sarn', it was produced as a television play by French Television ORTF in 1968, with Dominique Labourier as Prue, Josep Maria Flotats as Gedeon and Pierre Vaneck as Kester; the director was Claude Santelli. In 1989 it was again adapted for British television by the BBC, directed by Christopher Menaul and starring Clive Owen and Janet McTeer.

The story is set in rural Shropshire during the Napoleonic Wars. It is narrated by the central character, Prue Sarn, whose life is blighted by having a harelip. Only the weaver, Kester Woodseaves, perceives the beauty of her character, but Prue cannot believe herself worthy of him. Her brother Gideon is overridingly ambitious to attain wealth and power, regardless of who suffers while he does so. Gideon is set to wed his sweetheart Jancis, but he incurs the wrath of her father, the cruel and scheming self-proclaimed wizard Beguildy. An act of vengeance by Beguildy makes Gideon reject Jancis and tragedy engulfs them both. Prue is wrongly accused of murder and set upon by a mob, but Kester defies them and carries Prue away to the happiness she believed she could never possess because of her harelip.

The setting for the story has been attributed to the Meres of northern Shropshire, but is more likely to have been the area around Bomere Pool which was closer to the author's own home at Spring Cottage on Lyth Hill. These locations remained very rural at the time the novel was written, and Mary Webb was herself very much part of local country life there in the 1920s. Webb uses the rural setting to isolate Prue Sarn and her fellow characters from the larger world; at one point Prue tells us, "four years went by, and though a deal happened out in the world, naught happened to us.

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