YAY someone else who has read Two College Friends, I read this book recently and spent much of it cackling gleefully because the id is SO close to the surface. The part where Ned repeatedly kisses Tom's flushed, feverish, unconscious face while whispering "My darling, oh, my darling," and then rushes back behind Confederate lines so Stonewall Jackson can have him executed for breaking parole? But first Stonewall Jackson pauses to admire Ned's honor and the power of his loving friendship for Tom. OH MY GOD.

This book is apparently RPF about Loring and his own best friend from college (and I think also one of their professors?). I'd love to know what the best friend made of it, especially because Loring tragically died around the time of publication.

I haven't read The Precious Bane, but I did read Mary Webb's other novel Gone to Earth (because it was on the list of novels that Roald Dahl has Matilda read in Matilda, which is definitely a Choice), and it too is SO melodramatic, and not always in the fun way like Two College Friends. (I think a deep dive into melodrama is often more enjoyable in a less-skilled writer. Webb is too good to pull it off.) There's a scene where there are some birds pecking at windfall cherries "like the world pecks at poet's hearts."