Stella Gibbons - Other Writing

Other Writing

While Stella Gibbons is now known, if at all, as the author of Cold Comfort Farm she, "n fact, 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."

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."

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."

World War II had a profound effect 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."

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 show flashes of the novels' wit."

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. 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. " 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." 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." 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)

Gibbons' 1956 novel, Here Be Dragons, revolves around the intertwined fates of Nelly Sely, newly arrived from the country, and her cousin John, who is fully entrenched in London's bohemian underworld. Nell's father is a clergyman who has suffered a wobble of faith, her mother a brainy but frustrated housewife. John's parents are self-absorbed media types. Also of interest are Nell's debutante friend Elizabeth, John's bohemian associates, particularly the poet Benedict and his American girlfriend Gardis, and the young lovers Chris and Nerina, as well as the elderly Miss Lister and her cat Dandy. With its themes of bohemianism, post war readjustment, estraged families, national service, and changing family roles, Here Be Dragons paints a vivid picture of Britain's Forgotten Decade of 1945 to 1955, post war, pre-rock and roll.