My year with Stella...

Finished novel #16, Here be Dragons, today. Wow! Utterly brilliant!

I realise I am probably a bit gushing where Stella is concerned. I have read lots of opinion that can be summed up as "Stella's novels are up and down." And I kind of agree, after reading this straight after Shadow of a Sorcerer and especially Fort of the Bear. This is right back to the good stuff, up there with Westwood and Enbury Heath for me.

Maybe the fact that the action barely leaves Hampstead helps. No need for exotic locations. Mostly I think it's Nell, who is a proper Stella hero, and John Gaunt, the boy who would be King, who makes such a great anti-hero. It's always hard to write without giving away spoilers, which I never want to do, but Nell's 'journey' as we would call it today, made me so angry, and so happy when the penny finally drops and she sees John for what he really is.

The supporting cast of characters is just as good, and now, by the 1950s, TV and the BBC are starting to replace Bloomsbury as the "set" that Stella appears to want no part of.

What's been so great so far about reading the novels in chronological order is seeing how the journey is nothing like linear; almost like there are wrong turns, quieter periods, and then suddenly, BAM, a novel like this appears.

[Doing a bit of searching, I came across this 1956 film which gives a flavour of the Hampstead milieu of the story, including at about 9 minutes, the annual art exhibition with its canopy that is described in the book: https://www.londonsscreenarchives.org.uk/title/139/ - no tea rooms in the film though, closest is this coffee shop which looks more like the "espresso bar" that Nell and Elizabeth may have ended up opening!]

Next up: White Sand and Grey Sand

And for today, a lovely new Stella novel to begin 😀

Love the feel of opening a new book for the very first time lol, even if it is just a fairly mass market paperback!

Finished novel #15, "The Shadow of a Sorcerer."

I was kind of expecting this to be a little like Fort of the Bear: it's long out of print, it's set outside of the UK, and the original hardcover jacket features a similarly gaudy cover (although not AS gaudy, to be fair). This is another I read on archive.org / OpenLibrary, although I have now found a copy on Oxfam reduced to £10 so have ordered that, it hasn't arrived yet though.

We're back in the Alps for this one, in Austria specifically (and a little in Venice). The story seems to be standard Stella fare at first: Meg and her mother leave their middle class life behind for six months at a language school in the Alps in order for Meg to learn German in order to get a "top notch" job. So far so normal.

But at this point, Stella decides to throw in a little supernatural element: whether Esmé Carron is an actual sorcerer, or merely a tremendous influencer of people, it's hard to tell. The strange, other worldly effects he has, especially on Meg, are very well written though, and it's certainly a page turner. Obviously there are other Austenian subplots involving engagements and break offs and so on - the supernatural is only a small part of the whole!

Where this differs especially from Fort of the Bear is the descriptive writing about place. I don't know, but I would say from reading that Stella had at least been to Venice and the Alps, unlike North Western Canada!

There is a very funny bit of, I suppose it's called meta-fiction, late on in the book, when one of the characters is describing what happened earlier in the day:

Don't ask her what happened, because she won't talk. Perhaps she saw something nasty in the gondola-shed

It's not the first time Stella references CCF in a later novel; but a couple of paragraphs on, it gets even funnier:

The way [the previous character] had broken it was increasing Humphrey's feeling of dour withdrawal...with some rubbish out of that book about a farm that he was always quoting from...

It's like Stella is simultaneously reusing her most famous joke, mocking the fact that people endless repeated it, and pre-emptively mocking herself for reusing it. It's a commonly expressed view that in later life she was annoyed about the fact that she could never get away from CCF, and it seems to have some basis.

I know literally nothing about substack, except hearing a lot about it as a potential replacement a couple of years ago in the Twitter/X debacle. In my area at least, a lot of people seem to have moved their more "serious" output to medium.com...

Yes, proper rabbit hole material!

Also surprising: the post that took me there was this one: https://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2016/02/dress-down-sunday-cat-among-pigeons-by.html from 2016, and there are posts from this year! Conventional wisdom is that blogging is all but dead, but presumably there are in fact hundreds of thousands of blogs quietly doing their thing 😀

After reading a thread here about the acronym "BBs" I did a bit of seaching earlier and came across this quirky but rather wonderful site, loosely based around "Clothes in Books", which also has a couple of things to say about Stella!

clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-matchmaker-by-stella-gibbons.html

Finished novel #14, "Fort of the Bear."

I haven't found a physical copy yet, so read it on archive.org https://archive.org/details/bwb_KU-681-546] - I don't really know how this works in terms of copyright and so on. You have to create an account, and have to "borrow" the book, there's no printing or downloading, so it doesn't seem like a blatant copyright violation anyway! Hat tip to @Terpsichore who pointed my in this direction albeit obliquely but referencing Open Library way back in the thread. As an aside, I really don't like reading books only on the laptop screen, but hey ho, needs must and all that ;)

The story itself is very different from everything else by Stella that I've read so far. On one level it seems almost absurd: a British aristocrat takes his wife and three year old daughter, along with some of his servants, away from Sussex or wherever their country seat is, and into the wilds of North West Canada, in order to "get away from" cities. Hm, okay then.

However, as the story goes on, it gets much darker. Cristina (the wife) is ultimately trapped by her husband's uncompromising approach to life, and I think in reality it's not really about Canada at all: more, that one can be trapped anywhere, unable to extricate oneself from a situation, whether that be geographical or relational.

Plus, there are some extremely sad (and shocking!) moments. In summary, a very strange departure from the norm. I wonder how it went down on publication? I'm sure there must have been many who took this at face value, and in those terms it probably wasn't brilliantly reviewed.

Here's an alternative modern view, from one of the people behind Furrowed Middlebrow / DSP: https://furrowedmiddlebrow.blogspot.com/2018/04/a-slew-of-stella-gibbons-novels.html (at the bottom of the page).

There's no picture of the "book" this time of course; instead, the last page of the scan is the inside of the jacket, which has a picture of Stella I hadn't seen before.

Next up: The Shadow of a Sorcerer, which is also out of print.

Finished my fourth Barbara Pym of the year: Less than Angels. I have to say, I didn't like it quite as much as the other three. It does have some very funny moments (of course), but is more overtly sad as well. Thank heavens for Catherine, who at least seems to have her head screwed on when it comes to narcissistic and ultimately doomed Tom.

I so often read books like this with a kind of AIBU vibe going on the background. AIBU to think my boyfriend should not be going to talk to his most recent ex about his struggles to get over his first love?!? ;)

[Waves at @MyyearwithBarbara - how are you doing? I'm assuming you've read this one?]

Popped in to my local library today. This pic just about sums up Stella’s public image lol

Forgot you can't just add images inline. Attached now.

Fort of the Bear is clearly not going to be totally straightforward - it may end up being another trip to the BL. I have found a scan of the cover at least.

Tricky one. Mostly the answer is “whichever one I’ve just finished” 😂

But if pushed, I love Enbury Heath. My American and Westwood run it close though.

Half time report!

As it's the start of July, I thought I'd just do a quick progress update:

Novels: 13 of 26 read
Short stories: 0 of 3 volumes read
Poetry: 3 of 4 volumes read
Childrens: 1 of 1 read

So pretty much "on target" to finish the entire oeuvre by the end of the year 😀

(Attached image shows a clip from my tracking sheet. Dark Green - read this year and owned; light green - read this year but not owned; yellow - not read this year but owned; white - neither read this year nor owned)

Finished novel #13, The Swiss Summer. I loved this, just pure joy from start to finish.

We're not in London now (apart from a couple of very short sections), but rather, in a chalet in the Swiss Alps. By now the characters are recognisable enough: Lucy, nominally at least our hero, who is the voice of reason and sanity, who can keep her head while all around are losing theirs; Freda, the baddie of the piece, who seemingly can't open her mouth without uttering something inappropriate; an old-money widow, back in London, casually pulling strings; and an assorted cast of "young people" all of whom have their own foibles.

The story itself is simple enough, but that's the point for me: it's another perfectly formed world, even within the very tight confines of a chalet and the surrounding little bit of mountainous Switzerland. The "twist" such as it is is obvious to everyone except the characters, and that doesn't spoil it at all, as the reveal and reactions to it are delicious.

Just a couple of the notes that I made while reading - both ironically enough about London:

"...travelling down the claustrophobic steeps of the moving staircases on the Underground..." - what a lovely phrase, and so right for the older stations, where the escalators were built in tunnels running diagonally up and down, rather than the giant halls of newer stations like most of the Jubilee Line and Elizabeth Line. And, I might start a campaign to start calling them "moving staircases" again, escalator is such a technical, non-feeling word ;)

And this, very modern sequence of thoughts: "London, she thought. The problem of food. The headlines in the papers. The problem of drink. The nine o'clock news and the one o'clock news that took away your appetite if you were fool enough to turn it on. The problem of cigarettes. What will Russia do now or next? The Government. A hidden airplane throbbing through the low London clouds. Dammit those people are coming in tonight and we're out of gin. Bevin flies to, or at, Paris or Churchill or both. Or is it Bevan? The problem of Western Germany. The problem of Mass Emigration. Darling, I feel like seeing some people. The problem of Atomic energy. One of that new kind, screaming like a damned soul down the sky and out of sight in five seconds. The problem of imports. The problem. Hullo, Lu, my ducky, John's in town just for the night and we want to see you. Yes, she thought, living in London is like living in Hell."

[I should add that neither Lucy, nor me, nor Stella herself, ever actually leave London for long though (so far in my case at least).]

How wonderful that Dean Street Press has kept this one alive! I can't find anything about how DSP came to be so named; but their website has a fair bit of Soho/Theatreland vibe, so I assume it's taken from the Soho street. Somewhat randomly, I unexpectedly changed jobs a few weeks ago, and now work in an office in a lane just off... Dean Street!

Next up: Fort of the Bear, one that is still out of print, so I need to find a nice second hand copy.

Gerard is so awful isn't he! But, I'm in awe of Hilda, she seems to know exactly what she's doing throughout, despite his supposed superiority! And the scene where everybody meets, despite being visible a mile off, really is very funny :)