Novel: Gone to Earth

Overview
Gone to Earth is a lyrical rural novel set in the hills of Shropshire, centered on Hazel Woodus, a wild and innocent young woman whose elemental vitality sets her apart from the community around her. Mary Webb paints the landscape as a character in its own right, using intense nature imagery and folkloric resonance to frame a story about passion, belonging and the clash between instinct and social expectation. The novel traces how two very different men come to embody the opposing forces that will shape Hazel's fate.

Plot Summary
Hazel Woodus grows up close to the land, untutored in convention and guided by a keen, sometimes uncanny feeling for the natural world. Her beauty and simplicity attract attention and unsettle the neighbors; she moves through the countryside with a freedom that reads as both purity and danger to those bound by custom. Two men become central to her life: Jack Reddin, a commanding and often brutal country squire whose raw magnetism awakens passion, and Edward Marston, a timid, deeply moral young minister who responds with protective tenderness and an earnest desire to save her.
The novel follows the slow intensification of that triangle. Reddin pursues Hazel with a physical, possessive force that promises release from isolation but also threatens domination. Marston, guided by conscience and religious duty, offers a different kind of love, one that seeks to civilize and shelter Hazel from harm. As local gossip, clerical opinion and the pull of the land converge, Hazel is forced into choices that expose the limits of both masculine devotion and communal control. The narrative drives toward a tragic resolution in which Hazel's instinctive freedom collides irrevocably with the social and moral pressures surrounding her.

Main Characters
Hazel Woodus is both central mystery and embodiment of nature's ambivalence: open-hearted, sexual without guile, and vulnerable to being misread. Her inner life is simple but intense; Webb renders her perceptions of birds, weather and the soil in language that makes her almost elemental. Jack Reddin is charismatic, uncompromising and often violent, representing an earthy, almost pagan force that admires Hazel's wildness but seeks to possess it. Edward Marston stands on the opposite moral axis: earnest, bookish and painfully aware of sin and propriety, he is driven by the desire to rescue Hazel into respectability.
Secondary figures, the local gentry, the minister's circle, neighbors and law, amplify the pressures on Hazel. They react to her with a mixture of fascination, fear and moral certainty that ultimately limits her options and demonstrates the novel's interest in how communities manage what they cannot understand.

Themes and Motifs
Gone to Earth explores the tension between instinct and civilization, presenting nature as both nurturing and indifferent, while human institutions attempt to regiment and name that ambiguity. The novel interrogates gendered power: Hazel's sexuality and independence unsettle men who respond either by domination or attempted moral reform. Folklore, animal imagery and the changing seasons recur as motifs that link human feeling to a larger, often merciless natural order.
Webb also examines the language of religion and redemption, showing how spiritual intention can become a force of control when divorced from empathy. The tragedy arises from miscommunication across different orders of value, the earthy and the ecclesiastical, and from the community's inability to hold a space for a person who refuses tidy categorization.

Style and Reception
Mary Webb's prose is richly descriptive, symbolic and sometimes archaic in tone, steeped in regional dialect and a deep attentiveness to landscape. Her lyrical intensity won admiration for its atmospheric power, even as critics noted a tendency toward overwrought sentiment and melodrama. Gone to Earth made a strong impression on readers drawn to rural tragedy and psychological realism, and it later inspired stage and film adaptations, testifying to the novel's haunting portrayal of a woman at odds with the forces that seek to define her.