The Spring of Joy: A Little Book of Healing by Mary Webb

with an introduction by Walter de la Mare

“To know the beauty of earth’s lineaments, one must watch them through the seasons. Spring is the time of points and immature half-rounds, when everything is folded. There is a gradual thickening of outline, a massing of shapes, a growing indefiniteness of branch and twig. The intrinsic structure of winter is being veiled by the new, extrinsic forms. Leaves cover the bare hawthorn; flowers foam over the leaves. Then comes summer; the underlying frame is obliterated. When the woods are flooded with bloom, the leaves are almost unnoticed; when the country is aswing with music and alight with colour and the fields are full of seeded grass, the curves of the flower are softly effaced and rounded into the regnant fruit...”

Mary Webb was passionately devoted to revealing nature in all of its expressions and forms. She was diagnosed with Graves’ disease at the age of 20, and in times of recovery she early noticed that her love of nature sped her healing. She also, in these sensitive times of contemplation and struggle, saw the natural world more tenderly and luminously; the urgencies of life were clearer.

The Spring of Joy collects together a group of exquisite essays of appreciation, written with the idea of succouring ‘the weary and wounded in the battle of life.’ They are an extraordinary record of a woman’s empathy, not only for the beauty, colour, form, delicacy and majesty of the natural world, but also for her fellow human beings who suffer.


PUBLICATION : September 25, 2016

ISBN : 978-0-9944306-6-3 paperback