My year with Stella...

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.

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.

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

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

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?]

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.

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

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 😀

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...

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.

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 #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

To the Post Office today, to pick up this lovely copy of the The Shadow of a Sorcerer - not an easy book to get hold of!

3rd impression from 1955 (the original year of publication) and in good condition, even the jacket is in reasonable condition, very happy with that. So the only hole in the novels so far is The Fort of the Bear - the search goes on lol

Nice article on comic novels in the Guardian today and no surprise who is top of the suggested list! 😂https://www.theguardian.com/culture/ng-interactive/2026/aug/01/what-makes-a-good-comic-novel-andrew-sean-greer-on-the-joy-of-funny-writing

Charity shop VMC haul yesterday 😀