Stella Gibbons
Stella Dorothea Gibbons (5 January 1902 – 19 December 1989) was an English author, journalist, and poet. She established her reputation with her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932) which has been reprinted many times. Although she was active as a writer for half a century, none of her later 22 novels or other literary works—which included a sequel to Cold Comfort Farm—achieved the same critical or popular success. Much of her work was long out of print before a modest revival in the 21st century.
Stella Gibbons
Stella Dorothea Gibbons
5 January 1902
London, England
19 December 1989 (aged 87)
London, England
Writer
English
1930–1970
The daughter of a London doctor, Gibbons had a turbulent and often unhappy childhood. After an indifferent school career she trained as a journalist, and worked as a reporter and features writer, mainly for the Evening Standard and The Lady. Her first book, published in 1930, was a collection of poems which was well received, and through her life she considered herself primarily a poet rather than a novelist. After Cold Comfort Farm, a satire on the genre of rural-themed "loam and lovechild" novels popular in the late 1920s, most of Gibbons's novels were based within the middle-class suburban world with which she was familiar.
Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Her style has been praised by critics for its charm, barbed humour and descriptive skill, and has led to comparison with Jane Austen. The impact of Cold Comfort Farm dominated her career, and she grew to resent her identification with the book to the exclusion of the rest of her output. Widely regarded as a one-work novelist, she and her works have not been accepted into the canon of English literature—partly, other writers have suggested, because of her detachment from the literary world and her tendency to mock it.
Life[edit]
Family background and childhood[edit]
The Gibbons family originated from Ireland. Stella's grandfather, Charles Preston Gibbons, was a civil engineer who spent long periods in South Africa building bridges. He and his wife Alice had six children, the second of whom—the eldest of four sons—was born in 1869 and was known by his fourth Christian name of "Telford". The Gibbons household was a turbulent one, with tensions arising from Charles Gibbons's frequent adulteries.[1] Telford Gibbons trained as a doctor, and qualified as a physician and surgeon at the London Hospital in 1897. On 29 September 1900 he married Maude Williams, the daughter of a stockbroker. The couple bought a house in Malden Crescent, Kentish Town, a working-class district of North London, where Telford established the medical practice in which he continued for the remainder of his life.[2]
Writing[edit]
Style[edit]
Gibbons's writing has been praised by critics for its perspicacity, sense of fun, charm, wit and descriptive skill—the last a product of her journalistic training—which she used to convey both atmosphere and character.[82][83] Although Beauman refers to "malicious wit",[84] Truss sees no cruelty in the often barbed humour, which reflected Gibbons's detestation of pomposity and pretence.[82][85] Truss has described Gibbons as "the Jane Austen of the 20th century",[82][n 7] a parallel which the novelist Malcolm Bradbury thought apt; Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm, with her "higher common sense", is "a Jane-ite heroine transformed into a clear-eyed modern woman". Bradbury also observed that many of Gibbons's novels end in Austen-like nuptials.[86]
Truss highlights the importance that Gibbons places on detachment as a necessary adjunct to effective writing: "Like many a good doctor, she seems to have considered sympathy a peculiar and redundant emotion, and a terrible waste of time."[49] This matter-of-fact quality in her prose might, according to Gibbons's Guardian obituarist Richard Boston, be a reaction against the turbulent and sometimes violent emotions that she witnessed within her own family who, she said, "were all madly highly-sexed, like the Starkadders".[87] It is, observed Neville, an irony that the overheated melodrama that Gibbons most disliked was at the heart of her one great success; Gibbons's writings on everyday life brought her restrained approval, but no noticeable literary recognition.[6] Nevertheless, her straightforward, style, unadorned except in parody, is admired by Rachel Cooke, who praises her as "a sworn enemy of the flatulent, the pompous and the excessively sentimental."[21] While short of sentimentality, Gibbons's writing, in prose or verse, did not lack sensitivity. She had what one analyst described as "a rare ability to enter into the feelings of the uncommunicative and to bring to life the emotions of the unremarkable".[60]
Some of Gibbons's poetry expressed her love of nature and a prophetic awareness for environmental issues such as sea pollution, decades before such concerns became fashionable.[6] In a critical summary of Gibbons's poems, Loralee MacPike has described them as "slight lyrics ... [which] tend toward classic, even archaic, diction, and only occasionally ... show flashes of the novels' wit".[60] Such lines as "my thoughts, like purple parrots / Brood / In the sick light"[88] come dangerously close indeed to the overblown rhetoric she satirized in Cold Comfort Farm: "How like yaks were your drowsy thoughts".[89]
Reception and reputation[edit]
The immediate and enduring success of Cold Comfort Farm dominated the rest of Gibbons's career. Neville thought that after so singular a success at the start of her career, the rest was something of an anticlimax, despite her considerable industry and undoubted skills.[6] The 1985 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature defines Gibbons solely in terms of Cold Comfort Farm; it mentions none of her other works—while providing her bêtes noires Morgan and Mary Webb with full entries.[90] To Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm became "That Book" or "You-Know-What", its title never mentioned.[91] Despite her growing irritation and expressed distaste for it, the book continued to be lauded by successive generations of critics, Boston described it as "one of those rare books of comic genius that imprints itself on the brain and can never afterwards be eradicated".[87] A more negative view of the book has been expressed by the literary critic Mary Beard, who considers it "a rather controlling victory of modern order, cleanliness, contraception and medicine over these messy, different, rural types ... I found myself screaming for the rights of these poor country folk NOT to fall into the hands of people like Flora".[92]