My year with Stella...

[Waawo]

...has begun!

I plan to spend my fifty somethingth year - and that surely is some kind of mistake - reading all of Stella Gibbons' novels. There are 26, of which I've previously read less than half, and own less than a quarter.

Since I want to read other things too, I'll try to squeeze each novel into a week, leaving a week in between for some variety. Some are not quite novels that can be read "while you eat an apple" though, so this may not work out.

Yesterday I wandered down to Waterstones to treat myself to a nice new reading copy of Cold Comfort Farm - the first novel, published in 1932. I've read this before, a few times in fact. It's a tale of our heroine Flora's attempts to tame her somewhat wild Sussex-based distant relations, as an alternative course to just getting a job.

I'm a few chapters in now, and the familiarity makes it a bit like slipping on comfortable pyjamas or slippers. I'm amazed how amongst the, honestly, slightly obvious seeming rural parody, Stella shows herself as sharp as a tack. For instance, she clearly knew what more recently we might call a 'crazymaker', since this is one the best descriptions of such a person I have read, by any author:

"If she intended to tidy up life at Cold Comfort, she would find herself opposed at every turn by the influence of Aunt Ada. Flora was sure that this would be so. Persons of Aunt Ada's temperament were not fond of a tidy life. Storms were what they liked; plenty of rows, and doors being slammed, and jaws sticking out, and faces white with fury, and faces brooding in corners, and faces making unnecessary fuss at breakfast, and plenty of opportunities for gorgeous emotional wallowings, and partings for ever, and misunderstandings, and interferings, and spyings, and, above all, managing and intriguing. Oh, they did enjoy themselves! They were the sort that went trampling all over your pet stamp collection, or whatever it was, and then spent the rest of their lives atoning for it. But you would rather have had your stamp collection."

Really looking forward to discovering the rest of her oeuvre. Enbury Heath is one of my favourite books ever - if there's anything else as good as that, this will have been time well spent!

I know there are a few here who like to see covers, so I've added a picture :)

What put it into your head to do this project?

This thread actually! :)

Good luck with it! It's a good idea and now I might do the same with Agatha Christie.

I liked the part you quoted-I know someone exactly like that and it made me smile.

I also have the five Cazelet novels, so reading those would fulfill both the one author project and Read From Your Shelf.

Edit to say that the Cazelet novels won't fulfill the one author, as Elizabeth jane Howard has written much more than this series...still, it's a baby step

Two challenges for the price of one, excellent :)

And, Cazelet as a group sounds great! A gap in my reading, I have read none of those (although I have read a couple of standalones by EJH).

I'll let you know how I get on!

If I had the time-and money-I would like to read every Persephone book. I have 19 of them-including all the Dorothy Whipple's- but I think there are 150 in total-so maybe that's a lifetime ambition.

See you this time next year!

One down, 25 to go! Cold Comfort Farm finished very quickly, I'm pretty familiar with it and I'm still off work, they won't all be as quick as this.

I mentioned earlier about the OTT rural parody - I mean, it's parody, so of course it's over the top - but here's an example:

"The man's big body, etched menacingly against the bleak light that stabbed in from the low windows, did not move. His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. A woman...Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in this veins like slow yeast. She-woman. Young, soft-coloured, insolent. His gaze was suddenly edged by a fleshy taint. Break her. Break. Keep and hold and hold fast the land. The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, his..."

And yet, Stella is also capable of such modern self-aware things as this, almost breaking the fourth wall:

"...though it was too true that life as she is lived had a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists."

Anyway, once more Flora's plans to assert order and normality on Cold Comfort Farm have worked out as slickly as a Shakespearean comedy, and I move on to Bassett, a book I have not read and don't yet own.

(The other book in the pic is my earlier copy of CCF)

Many thanks for this reminder of what a great writer Stella is. Cold Comfort Farm has long been one of my favourite novels but I haven't read many of her other titles and hadn't heard of Enbury Heath. Have now bought it as one of my first 2026 reads (at the same time already breaking the read what you own challenge but have reasoned that as long as the book is owned by 1st Jan is still sort of counts!)
Have fun reading her other titles in 2026 and I'll be checking in on the thread for any more recommendations.

@MagpieCastle Ah you lucky thing, getting to read Enbury Heath for the first time!

At the second hand bookstall this morning, came across this pair of Mary Webb novels. This is the author most commonly
named when people are talking about what Cold Comfort Farm is a parody of - I haven’t read anything of Webb, so on to the tbr pile they have gone :)

Lovely original Virago editions.

You can see the movie of Gone to Earth on YouTube-a nice way to spend a cold afternoon.

Stella No.2 “Bassett” ready and waiting :) I have 3 chapters of my other book left, so will probably finish that tomorrow and start Bassett on Thursday…

The “other” book is The Monk by Matthew Lewis btw which is pretty different from Stella, being an eighteenth century gothic proto-horror novel, but it’s also wild in its own way!

I love Cold Comfort Farm but have never read anything else by her. Maybe this is the year I should!

How wonderful. I've only read a few of her books but have loved them all in different ways. I look forward to your reviews of those I don't know.

Two down, 24 to go!

Finished the second novel, Bassett. First time read for me.

I'm shocked at just how modern this seems in structure and outlook. Of course it's "dated" in many of the ways you'd expect of something written almost 100 years ago. But for perspective, this was published only 120 years after Pride & Prejudice.

The story, or rather, the two stories in one, is really rather clever. In one of the earliest scenes, two of the characters from one of the story halves meet one of the characters from the other story half; if this were more conventional, you'd expect their stories to intertwine, especially as they take place in houses which are walking distance apart. But in fact, the opposite is true: apart from attending one party together, the two halves never actually meet again.

The modernity I think comes from the fact that fairly universal human themes are in play. I read on a thread on here this morning someone saying, in response to basically "aibu to think that the world is going to hell in a handcart", that that's nonsense, and that every 80-100 years there appears to be something of a global reconfiguring of things, that feels to those involved like the end of the world as they know it. We're in one of those periods now perhaps, and this between the wars novel deals with the previous one. The house in the titular village of Bassett is the scene of the decline of its upper middle class inhabitant, Miss Pedsoe, who is - horror! - having to take in boarders to make ends meet.

The comedy comes from her unlikely partner, Miss Baker, and east end seamstress who is effectively retiring and investing her life savings. Miss Baker is fantastically sweary (for the time), I couldn't help but laugh out loud at her shouting out of the window at a pair of rogue-ish characters who have just been evicted from the house:

"Wait till he...hears how you left her alone upstairs when she was ill for hours on end, you pair of dirty idle lazy good-for-nothing saucy useless robbing thieving sluts you!"

And not long after this, when the house's owner Miss Padsoe returns, in something of a signature move for Stella, Miss Baker consoles her and comedy instantly dissolves into pathos:

"Now don't you fret. Everything's all right." Of course, everything was not all right. Miss Padsoe was sixty, her friends were scattered, poor, dead, the world of her deliciously gay and gentle youth had vanished more horribly than any dream. She had not a thing to do in the world but move uselessly about inside her body, waiting for death.

Meanwhile, the other side of this story, the occupants of the "big house", a few rungs higher up the social ladder, are also demonstrating how modern this story is. At this stage, while Miss Padsoe is learning how to earn money from taking in lodgers, they are unaffected, and continue life much as it ever was, driving around in a Bentley, throwing wild parties, going to shows in London, going on month long trips abroad, and fretting over love affairs and the like. And, just in case you feel too sorry for Miss Padsoe, we're reminded, through her going in to town "to engage a girl to do some cleaning" when they have a guest, that despite the hardships, she is still nowhere near the bottom of the pile.

All in all, a much more complex novel than I was expecting, considering it was only Stella's second full length work. I really enjoyed this.

Now, a break for something else, and then, the wonderful Enbury Heath (published 1935), one of my favourite books.

In second hand news, I came across a lovely 1938 copy of the 1916 novel The Golden Arrow by Mary Webb. As that's her first novel, I've decided to read that before Gone to Earth or Precious Bane. There's no dustjacket so the cover is dull, but there are lovely illustrations inside...

Really interested in your reading odyssey, @Waawo - I had a Stella Gibbons frenzy some years ago (having read CCC aeons before, when I was in my teens, probably), and started collecting all her books in hardback. I got a fair way, then they suddenly began appearing quite inexpensively on kindle! 🤬 oh well. I agree about Bassett, I re-read it not that long ago and thought it was great. Our Rather Dated Bookclub on here did Westwood last year and I loved that too.

@Terpsichore Seems like there was a mini-revival a few years ago, including Vintage Classics publishing a bunch of the novels in paperback. Think possibly it was on the back of two "new" novels being published in 2016?

Looking forward to Westwood, I've seen the "rather dated" thread on here, I'm saving that for my own private read-along when I get there - seven others first, between Bassett and Westwood :)

I hope you enjoy Westwood when you get there, @Waawo. I think I was the outlier in giving it a major thumbs up. Gibbons is such an interesting writer - everyone knows CCF and very few people are aware of her many other books. Every now and then I intend to dig out the biography of her that’s lurking on the shelves somewhere. I don’t really make New Year resolutions but maybe that should be my 2026 goal 😉

I've finished The Golden Arrow by Mary Webb - it's good! I think based on this novel she is unfairly maligned by talk of being the subject of Stella's parody in CCF. It was Webb's first book though, so perhaps the sequence is going to become more parody worthy!

Considering this was published in 1916, a time with a fair bit of trauma in the western world, a couple of very modern thoughts, almost (neo)Stoic in style, stood out:

(just after a giant argument and reconciliation between two of the main characters, following her visit to a local medicine-woman to procure abortion medicine and his discovery):

Neither Lily nor Joe, nor Nancy nor Mrs. Arden noticed that their respective weakness, doggedness, lack of principle, surfeit of principle, plethora of principle, tragedy and comedy, had left things just as they were; that with their will or without it the courses of life flowed on to their undreamed-of endings, from their mysterious source.

And later:

But when Stephen awoke, he only wanted to go to bed, and never noticed the boots [of his child, born while he was away]. It is the tragedy of the self-absorbed that when the great moments of their lives go by in royal raiment with a sound of silver flutes, they are so muffled in self and the present that they neither hear nor see.

Overall it's a simple enough tale, almost a prototype for later works like A Kind of Loving, but more than that, I took away some great rural description, a very deep sense of the Shropshire setting, rural writing of a style that has come right back into fashion in this century.

Looking forward to reading more Mary Webb now!

Oh, the woodcut style drawings by Norman Hepple in this illustrated edition are pretty good too!

In second hand news, at the weekend I came across this Folio Society copy of Cold Comfort Farm. This is surprisingly common, but this one is in good condition and was a good price, only a few pounds, so it came home with me.

Quentin Blake's illustrations aren't loved by everyone, but I like them, especially Amos, who looks like a kind of manic Michael Rosen...

I really like the idea of immersing myself in the works of just one writer. You know, really living and breathing their words. Of course, it depends who you read. If you spend a year reading nothing but Thomas Hardy or Philip Larkin, you’re going to find your mood drop. Immerse yourself in P G Wodehouse for a year, however, and you’ll be walking on air.

I have often fantasised about spending a year reading nothing but Dickens or Jane Austen or Iris Murdoch. Or maybe George Eliot. I also like the idea of total immersion in Shakespeare or William Blake. I think it’s a great idea OP. Enjoy.

Thanks. The idea just started after reading a thread on here and kind of grew from there.

I had at one point many many years ago read everything published by Stephen King - I can't recall how many books he had written at that time, I had 100 volumes in my collection but there were a lot of editions, pb and hb, so less than 50 perhaps. I doubt I would consider an undertaking like that now, but 26 seems manageable.

I believe there is a literature course at Oxford that requires students to read the complete works of Shakespeare during one academic year...

I've always wanted to totally immerse myself in some great literary monster – you know, a real challenge. I once read the autobiography of a British philosopher called Bryan Magee. He describes how he would withdraw for a few months now and then to totally immerse himself in one great work of philosophy – Plato's Republic, for example, or Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. He would tell friends not to contact him, and would do nothing night and day except read that one book. Then he'd sort of emerge from his hibernation a changed man.

If I had the time and money to do such a thing, I'd choose the collected works of William Blake. Or maybe Proust. When my mother retired, she read the complete works of Charles Dickens – every word. Got to say I was very impressed. But it wouldn't have to be a heavyweight writer. If you spent a year totally immersed in Sherlock Holmes or P. G. Wodehouse or Douglas Adams you'd come out of it a changed person.

I like the idea also of walking alongside an author through their life's work, following their arc. There's a slowness to it, a deliberate feel to the whole thing.

Down rabbit holes... came across this audio of Stella speaking on Woman's Hour in 1974 - 52 years ago, almost as old as me :)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000pp86

This clip was replayed in a 2020 episode of Woman's Hour, in advance of a lunchtime serialisation of her book My American. The 2020 guest is Lynne Truss of Eats, Shoots & Leaves fame.

The segment starts at about 32:15 and Stella's voice begins at about 34:55

It seems like there's very little audio of Stella out there, and no video. The lack of radio surprises me, although pre-war especially I think it wouldn't have been routinely recorded. The full version of the 1974 interview is apparently available in the BL's sound collection, so maybe that is something else to add to my list. Visions of a 1960s style "listening booth"...