The Golden Arrow

First published in 1916, The Golden Arrow exemplifies Mary Webb’s early exploration of the Shropshire countryside as both a physical and symbolic landscape. The novel situates its characters within a world where love, poverty, and superstition converge, rendering individual lives inseparable from the natural and folkloric environment that shapes them. Through her highly figurative prose and symbolic motifs, Webb elevates the ordinary to the mythic, creating a narrative that examines not only personal longing but also the larger tension between human aspiration and the immutable cycles of the natural world.