Mary Webb

Mary Webb wrote Shropshire the way she saw it — hill farms, poachers, and country people crushed by their own superstitions — while suffering from Graves' disease and selling her own vegetables at Shrewsbury market. She died at forty-six, unknown; six months later the Prime Minister praised her at a public dinner and her books sold in the hundreds of thousands. Stella Gibbons parodied her, affectionately, in Cold Comfort Farm.