Stella Gibbons

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Stella Dorothea Gibbons (5 January 1902—19 December 1989) was an English novelist, journalist, poet and short-story writer.

Her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. A satire and parody of the pessimistic ruralism of Thomas Hardy and his followers, the "loam and lovechild" genre, as some called it, Cold Comfort Farm introduces a self-confident young woman, quite self-consciously modern, pragmatic and optimistic, into the grim, fate-bound world those novelists tended to portray.

Contents

[edit] Early Life

Gibbons's own family was suburban and middle-class, but in some of its psychological dimensions is said to have been "not dissimilar to the Starkadders" described in that novel.[1]

In her autobiographical novel Enbury Heath she describes her family life with two younger brothers (Gerald and Lewis) in the third person: "She grew up in the wreck of hope and the slow, strange living-death of love, but because she was conceived in love, she was the happiest of the three, and she never forgot it."[1]

Her father was a "bad man, but a good doctor". Stella's mother Maudie was a retiring woman not able to stand up to the domineering spirit of her husband Telford. Stella's father worked in a poor area of London and was a sympathetic doctor who would not charge patients that could not pay. Nevertheless, he was prone to violent outbursts against his wife and was a womaniser. In a fit of rage he once threw a knife at Maudie, and often resorted to whiskey and later laudanum to deal with his inner demons.

Stella's turbulent upbringing was to play a significant part in the creation of her most noted work Cold Comfort Farm.

When Stella was eleven her father threatened to commit suicide. Stella's father begged her to stop him:

As the ranting went on Stella noticed that Telford had a slight smile on his face and was deriving a secret pleasure from the scene, much as an actor might do from tearing a passion to tatters. She was appalled. To suffer from a fit of despair was one thing; but actually enjoying causing a scene was quite another.

[2]

[edit] Early Writing

Stella Gibbons took a two year diploma in journalism from 1921, and secured employment with the British United Press in 1924 after a year without work. It was during this time that she began a relationship with Walter Beck, a relationship that was to form the basis of characters in her second novel Bassett.

In 1926 Stella’s mother died, aged 48. During the funeral service Stella’s father, probably drunk, was heard to say of his wife: “Oh, she was a bitch! She never cooked properly! What I had to put up with!” Stella’s father died later in the same year, a death that was not regretted by his daughter.[3]

From 1927 Stella lived with her two brothers in Vale Cottage near the highest point in Hampstead Heath. Stella was the main breadwinner at this time and somewhat resentful of her brothers for their spendthrift, dissolute ways. She also felt that her domestic efforts were taken for granted and unappreciated.

Gibbons later worked for the Evening Standard, and then the Lady. It was in 1928, while working for the Standard, that the novels of Mary Webb enjoyed a resurgence in popularity thanks to the advocacy of the then Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. It was Gibbons' job to summarise the plot of Webb's novel The Golden Arrow, which was being serialised in the newspaper, for those readers who had missed the previous installment. Stella Gibbons was not a fan of Mary Webb.

In 1930 The Mountain Beast was published; a collection of Stella Gibbons' poetry. The collection was dedicated to Stella's mother who had died some years earlier. Her most widely known poems from this collection are 'The Giraffes', and 'Coverings'. The former being admired by Virginia Woolf. Although her poetry collection attracted considerable positive attention at the time of publication it, like much else in Stella Gibbons' body of work, has now fallen into obscurity.

[edit] Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons will forever be associated with her first and most successful novel. Cold Comfort Farm's success was immediate (although it was banned in the Irish Free State because of its endorsement of contraception) and long-lived and its legacy has over-shadowed all of her other writing both while Stella Gibbons was alive and after her death. In 1966 she wrote:

Cold Comfort Farm is a member of my family; he is like some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but who is often an embarrassment and a bore.

[4]

It is a novel that, amongst other things, satirises the somewhat overwrought novels of authors such as Mary Webb whose work Gibbons encountered whilst working at the Standard.

In 1934 Stella Gibbons made a speech accepting the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse at the Institut Français in London for Cold Comfort Farm. She received ₤40 and the opprobrium of the previously complimentary Virginia Woolf: "I was enraged to see they gave the ₤40 to Gibbons.... Who is she? What is this book?" Perhaps Woolf was irked by the novels satire of D.H. Lawrence.Perhaps she was being kind to a friend.

Sequels to the book, published in 1940 and 1949, “did not have the same topicality or literary astringency as the original,” nor, it should be added, the same popularity.[5]

[edit] Influences

Stella Gibbons admired Jane Austen and Keats. Both writers are directly quoted in her first two books. Austen features as the epigraph to Cold Comfort Farm and Bassett, and Keats is quoted in Bassett: ‘I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections.’

Three of Gibbons’ novels rework fairy tales. Nightingale Wood (1938) adapts Cinderella, My American (1939) adapts The Snow Queen, and White Sand and Grey Sand (1958) takes on Beauty and the Beast.

Ouida was another influence on the writing of Gibbons. One critic thought Ticky (1943) was a parody of Ouida as Cold Comfort Farm had been a parody of Mary Webb, but she denied this. Indeed Ticky is more of a tribute to Ouida. White Sand and Grey Sand (1958) may also have been inspired by a Ouida novel.

[edit] Other Writing

While Stella Gibbons is now known, if at all, as the author of Cold Comfort Farm she, “In fact, [was] the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short-stories, and four volumes of poetry – most of them refreshing, original, and good enough to reward re-reading.”[6]

Gibbons’ body of work earned admiration from many respected writers and intellectuals, and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Most of her novels sold solidly and received positive reviews.

Gibbons herself claimed to be a poet rather than a novelist, “to lack interest in people (as opposed to ideas, nature, and the ‘possible existence of God’), and to be handicapped for fiction by a distaste for emotional ‘scenes’. Irony may lurk in such claims.”[7]

Stella Gibbons’ novels show a fine eye for the awkwardness and conflicts when different social groups come into contact. She “writes of young love with that mixture of sensibility and romance unique to those who lived through both World Wars…. Gibbons also shows the condition – it is not dire enough to be called a plight – of middle aged women with uncertain financial futures.”[8]

World War Two had a profound affect on Gibbons, and she was an active writer during this period. Many of her books from this time are published in “full conformity with the war economy standard”, and it is this period of austerity which she writes about particularly well. Novels such as The Bachelor, Westwood and The Matchmaker “capture England’s grim winter existence during the last years of the war. Gibbons is at her best describing the painful ordinariness of life under siege.”[9]

Gibbons had a “rare ability to enter into the feelings of the uncommunicative and to bring to life the emotions of the unremarkable.” Her short stories are generally regarded as slight “much in the style of Katherine Mansfield but too often without Mansfield’s incisive characterization”, while her poetry tends “toward classic, even archaic, dictum, and only occasionally [does it] show flashes of the novels’ wit.”[10]

Stella Gibbons first book after Cold Comfort Farm was Bassett (1933). The book deals with the nature of relationships, sexual and non-sexual. Two people of the same sex, apparently quite incompatible, find fulfilment together, while two young lovers do not. Linking both stories is the paradox that those who recognise their need for another are frequently more fulfilled and mature than the seemingly self-sufficient. [11]

The book is partly based on a relationship Gibbons had with Walter Beck between 1924 and 1928, and the Shelling family in the novel is strikingly similar to Beck’s family. “[Walter Beck] was good-looking and rich, and he and Stella first met on the Heath. Beyond that, the facts available are scanty. Stella was engaged to Beck, and told her sister-in-law Renee that she committed herself sexually to the relationship and would go away with him to hotels at weekends. They would sign the register under false names and she would have to put on a wedding ring, an act she found peculiarly humiliating. Because Stella was deeply in love she tried to pretend that she found it all daring and exciting, but such a light-hearted attitude was alien to her.” [12]

Stella ended the relationship in 1928. In the novel it is the Beck-figure that ends the affair.

Published in 1935 Enbury Heath is Gibbons most autobiographical novel: “only the thinnest veil of fictional gauze covers raw experience and transforms the book into a novel.”[13] Although the book lacks a strong narrative it describes the author’s upbringing and her relationship with her two brothers in a way that Gibbons clearly felt was true for her.

In both Bassett and Enbury Heath Gibbons shows her skill at capturing the nuance of class conflict in day-to-day English life:

“If this interview had been taking place thirty years ago, Miss Padsoe would have been interviewing Miss Baker as a prospective house parlour-maid, and Miss Baker would have been m’ming her. The War, a bared sword, lay between 1903 and 1933, but Miss Padsoe had never quite taken in the War, somehow. She missed the m’ming.” Bassett.

“Maysie tells me you write poetry,” said Mrs Kellett. “Do have another tomato.” “Yes,” murmured Sophia. “No thank you.” “That’s very clever,” said Mrs Kellet, rather as a missionary might congratulate an aborigine on his skill at throwing the boomerang. Enbury Heath

[edit] Family Life

Gibbons married actor and singer Allan Bourne Webb in 1933. They had one daughter. Webb came from a family with a strong religious background and although not a practicing Christian at the time she wrote Cold Comfort Farm Gibbons was to become one after her marriage.

In October 1935 Stella gave birth to her only child, Laura. Later that year she published her only children’s book The Untidy Gnome which was dedicated to her daughter.

Stella and Allan’s daughter married in 1957. The marriage produced two sons.

In 1958 Stella’s husband Allan was diagnosed with liver cancer. He died in July, 1959.

[edit] Final Years

After 1972 Stella Gibbons published no further work. In the years up to her death in 1989 she wrote two unpublished novels: The Yellow Houses and An Alpha. The death of her husband in 1959 had gradually brought Stella to withdraw from the public sphere and concentrate on her grandchildren.

Stella Gibbons died in December, 1989. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery next to her husband Allan. Her nephew, Reggie Oliver, read two of Stella's poems at the funeral: The Bell and Fairford Church. Only a scattering of friends and family attended.

At the time of her death, the Observer commented: "It ought not to be forgotten that Miss Gibbons is a poet as well as a novelist... She handles sky, bare trees, and rough fields with the same quiet sutlety as people. She sees idiosyncracy in nature and humanity, and makes both live".[14]

Since her death, Stella Gibbons’ reputation has continued to rest on Cold Comfort Farm, her only book still in print. Many of her other novels however deserve to be read. Reggie Oliver, in his excellent biography of his famous Aunt, particularly puts the case for Nightingale Wood, The Bachelor, Westwood, and Starlight. Ticky also has its fans.

[edit] Bibliography

1930 The Mountain Beast (poetry)
1932 Cold Comfort Farm
1933 Bassett
1933 The Priestess (poetry)
1935 Enbury Heath
1935 The Untidy Gnome (for children)
1936 Miss Linsey and Pa
1937 Roaring Tower and Other Stories (short stories)
1938 Nightingale Wood
1938 The Lowland Venus (poetry)
1939 My American
1940 Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (short stories)
1941 The Rich House
1943 Ticky
1944 The Bachelor
1946 Westwood
1949 The Matchmaker
1949 Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
1950 Collected Poems
1951 The Swiss Summer
1953 Fort of the Bear
1954 Beside the Pearly Water (short stories)
1955 The Shadow of a Sorcerer
1956 Here Be Dragons
1958 White Sand and Grey Sand
1959 A Pink Front Door
1962 The Weather at Tregulla
1964 The Wolves Were in the Sledge
1965 The Charmers
1967 Starlight
1968 The Snow Woman
1970 The Woods in Winter

[edit] References

  1. ^ Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A life of Stella Gibbons, (Bloomsbury, 1998, pp.9-10)
  2. ^ Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Life of Stella Gibbons. (Bloomsbury, 1998, p.19)
  3. ^ Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Life of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury, 1998.
  4. ^ Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Life of Stella Gibbons. (Bloomsbury, 1998, p.123.)
  5. ^ Todd, Janet (ed.) Dictionary of British Women Writers. (Routledge, London, 1989)
  6. ^ Schlueter, P. & J. (eds). An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. (Garland Publising, New York, 1988).
  7. ^ Virginia Blain, Patricia Clement, Isobel Grundy. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. (Batsford Ltd, 1990)
  8. ^ Schlueter, P. & J. (eds). An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. (Garland Publising, New York, 1988).
  9. ^ Schlueter, P. & J. (eds). An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. (Garland Publising, New York, 1988).
  10. ^ Schlueter, P. & J. (eds). An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. (Garland Publising, New York, 1988).
  11. ^ Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Life of Stella Gibbons. (Bloomsbury, 1998)
  12. ^ Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Life of Stella Gibbons. (Bloomsbury, 1998)
  13. ^ Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Life of Stella Gibbons. (Bloomsbury, 1998)
  14. ^ Here quoted from the Penguin Books ad published in the back pages of other books publishhed by them, e.g. the 1934 edition of Ignazio Silone's Fontamara; the precise date of the Observer review was not given.

[edit] External links