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 :)

Forgot to post this. Popped in to City of London Library at the Barbican. Three of Stella’s novels on the shelf. Shelved in “Classics” :)

@Waawoit would be interesting to compare Colin MacInness’ & Stella Gibbons’ writing styles.

I know I was also impressed by poems by Stella Gibbons. I can’t remember any of the titles though. Are you intending to read her poetry too?

Well, I have the titles of her two volumes of poetry on my list. There's also a "collected poems" volume from 1950. But all three are hard to come by, especially the first poetry book, "The Mountain Beast", which is always priced in four figures. So until now I've only seen the few poems that are collected in other places on the internet, newspaper archives and so on.

There are a couple here for example: https://www.best-poems.net/stella_gibbons/index.html

A Fat Woman in Bond Street

Man died for this,
Christ died that these
Mottled and inward-turning knees
Might swell the web of Milanese.
Your swollen, gargoyle face to make
Satan coiled in an emerald brake,
And tempted Eve; and now his skin
Makes shoes to cram your hoofs within...

What shall I buy?
The world was made
That you might hang your purple skin
With amber and clear jade.
The earth is yours.
Young sperm-whales died
For bones to clamp your putty side;
Beasts of great strength and savage line
Died in their shame to make you fine.

Waddle complacently in the sun...

------

Writ in Water
In memory of John Keats

What stronger rune to be written in?
Seething, or locked in arcane permafrost.
Sans water, man would shrunken be, and lost.
His very substance is of water made,
Of water, and of dust.

Whither its cloudy depth, secret and warm,
Shapeless and colourless, his primal shade,
A pulsing jelly, burgeoned into form.
Three days he can exist without the thin
Life-making flow. And music, in full streams,
Pours down all hills, giving voice to dreams.

Sweet boy, bright star eclipsed at twenty-five,
Your genius erred in thinking water humble -
Rivers shall run while Earth herself’s alive;
Iron rust, stone crumble.

She doesn’t hold back on that first one, does she?!?

lol yeah! i really like that "hoofs" as well, where "hooves" would be more proper, but read aloud it really gives it an extra wallop, where (I anyway) can't say "cram your hooves within" without it sounding breathy and a bit weak lol

There are a lot of broad brush descriptions of London in Stella's novels: as I walked down the Strand, the scene on Hampstead Heath, that kind of thing.

Every so often though, there are detailed descriptions of places that are small and very specific, like this from Enbury Heath:

In her lunch hour in the summer months Sophia liked to sit on Oliver Goldsmith's tombstone near the Temple Churchyard, under a bright green plane tree, eating a tomato sandwich bought from Dolly's, the cooked meat shop on the corner, and admiring the thin, vivid grass growing round the base of the Templars' Church...

As I was only a few minutes along Chancery Lane from Temple Church today for work, I popped down there during lunch to look for the spot. It's not obvious at first, and even the guide inside the church didn't know where the grave was, but eventually I did find it, at what is now the back of the somewhat altered church. Sadly, there is no plane tree now. But there are benches for the summer, and it's a surprisingly quiet spot considering it's about a minute away from the bustle of Fleet Street.

Since Enbury Heath is considered semi-autobiographical, and Stella was working in Fleet Street for many years, I think it's reasonable to think that it was in fact she who came to sit and eat lunch here, almost a hundred years ago.

Novel #5 done 😀

Nightingale Wood: it's hard to know where to start. I think it's brilliant, actually.

It's a (kind of) re-telling of the fairy tale Cinderella. There are dresses and weddings (and a funeral) and balls and a fairy godmother (and plenty of evil), and even a fool. And for as long as its 387 pages last, it's a perfect little world, that I totally believed in.

Underneath that, the book, published in 1938, is pregnant with anxiety about the coming war that was by then inevitable. It's dense, in story and allusion. There are so many echoes of so many things: Austen (of course), Jane Eyre, the bible. I'm sure there are tons more that I didn't even notice on a first read.

The book is really about multiple strata of society, from the top (landed gentry) to the bottom (a tramp). There are some lovely interactions, within but especially striking, between the layers.

Stella is so good at naming her made up places. We hear about the "most exclusive resort on the coast of Essex...so well organised in its business of supplying pleasure to wealthy people...melancholy is never permitted to creep over its neat grounds and gay little pavilions....It is a clean, well planned place, with no buildings earlier than 1900, and no slums..." And the name of this wonderful place? Stanton. Hard not to believe that isn't a deliberate aural play on Sanditon.

In between all of the Pride and Prejudice style goings on, you occasionally get a paragraph dropped in that just does something completely left field, like this one, the last sentence of which I may adopt as a motto:

Civilisation as we know it is corrupt. It may be doomed; there are plenty of omens. Its foundations are rat-eaten, its towers go up unsteadily into lowering clouds where drone the hidden battle-planes. But it can, and does, supply its young daughters with luxuries at prices they can afford. No woman need be dowdy, or shabbily genteel. While she has a few shillings to spend on clothes, she can buy something pretty and cheerful. This may not be much, but it is something. Tomorrow we die; but at least we danced in silver shoes.

---

Next up, after a bit of a break, is My American, which I already have but haven't yet read. I'm told it's also modelled on a fairy story: The Snow Queen.

Just realised it's been a week since I posted. Been reading other things: The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby (Rather Dated); and Moonlight Express by Monisha Rajesh (sleeper train joy).

Also realised that I forgot to mention a little while back that I finished Mary Webb's second novel, Gone to Earth. It's fair to say I understand a little more now how this genre could perhaps be lampooned. It's like the first novel (The Golden Arrow) on steroids. There's a fair bit of "rural misery" is all I'll say.

Lastly, here's the next Stella novel, which I should be starting in a few days - back to Vintage re-issues for this one 😀

Must get on with The Crowded Street myself. You’re really powering along @Waawo !

Winnifred Holtby! I’d forgotten about her. How I loved South Riding. It was serialised on tv too. From memory, Dorothy Tutin played the Headmistress.

Haven’t read that one, but liked The Crowded Street so will probably read more of hers 😀

South Riding is one of my favourite books.

Novel #6 done: My American

Honestly, I'm running out of superlatives for these mini-reviews. I'm just enjoying these novels so much, especially the ones I haven't read before, like this one.

Our hero is Amy Lee, a Londoner who loses both parents in separate tragic circumstances early on in life. And she really is a hero to me: as a young woman she literally takes on a male dominated industry from the bottom and engineers incredible success for herself.

Amy's tale is one half of the story; the other is that of Bob, a young American boy she meets outside Kenwood House aged ten or eleven; they meet eleven years later, having both undergone major changes in their lives.

Amy starts a job as the "office girl" at a Boys' paper which leads to a complete change in her life; and Bob's life takes a somewhat unexpected turn too.

As well as being fantastic on living and working in London in times gone by, this is another novel with more than a whiff of autobiography to it. There is also an ever so slight supernatural element to the story, almost as if Stella was just dipping a toe in these waters.

And, New York features too:

There was a long silence. Sounds came up clearly from the streets already burning in the sunlight, but the room, as it had been last night, was hushed as a tower in a fairy tale. The pictures on its white walls - a black and red lyre, some pale stone ruins where horses caracolled, a plate of dim fruits - glowed strangely with a life of their own, uncomforting, like windows opening on to uncanny landscapes. The real window, that had given last night on a witchlike panorama of quivering crimson lines and glittering symbols, now showed only ordinary roofs and walls against a dull hot sky where an aeroplane droned. It was nine o'clock in the morning in a modern city, where fear and money ruled the people as they have always ruled, yet along the hot ugly streets, side by side with the fear and the power of money, beauty and mystery walked as they have always walked, and at any moment a human being might step aside into them and stand still to dream, as Bob and Amy were dreaming now. But they only knew that they were in the midst of peace and silence and that it comforted them to be together.

I don't think anybody would claim Stella's works as any kind of high literature; but just on story value, I love them. The worlds are complete and utterly believable (to me anyway).

Next up, a choice. The next book in published order (which I already have) is Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, a book of short stories. I'm trying to read in published order where I can, but of course have been skipping poetry and the one children's book because of limited availability. So I'm tempted to skip ChACCF (have to distinguish from Conference at Cold Comfort Farm lol) and leave it to the end, which also happily means it will be at about Christmas time 😀

The next novel is The Rich House from 1941 - another Vintage re-issue, but one I don't have yet.

Oh, last thought: I really need to have a read of The Snow Queen, which apparently this book is a re-telling of, since somehow I'd never read it.

The Snow Queen is lovely and subtly feminist (girl saves boy with the help of lots of female characters).

Just finished The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie. Seed planted by @BookAndPiano way back in January at the beginning of the thread! I don't recall ever reading AG before, even though some of the stories I feel I know just because of zeitgeist. I'm not really a fan of detective stories, either in books or on TV, and I never manage to work out whodunnit lol. But this is entertaining enough. In my mind I see Suchet as Poirot btw...

Purely coincidentally I have ended up reading “All Change” by Elizabeth Jane Howard next. It’s the last of the Cazalet Chronicles and its time frame is 1956-1958. The previous book in the series, “Casting Off” described the challenges of living in post war England well: the rations, the difficulty in getting servants, the cold etc. I’m looking forward to reading this one.

Maybe try some of her work as Mary Westmacott.

Absent in the Spring is wonderful. Just one woman's voice, telling us about her life but revealing her true self without meaning to do so.

I think it's a clever piece of writing.

Thanks, I might try the first CC book - one eye on an author for next year already ;)

Thanks I might try that - I had no idea AC had written under pseudonyms also

The next Stella novel is here! Dull cover though, there is a better version but I couldn’t find a copy for sale, will keep an eye out for that

This is the other cover

Enjoy! Wow, the other cover is way more aesthetically pleasing. You have a treat in store re: Cazalet Chronicles. I doubt you’ll only read the 1st one, as I expect you’ll want to know what happened to them all next.

Cazelets are such a comfort read. It's a shorthand with my friends, but they know my MIL was a wrong un when she was miserable about them.

Finished the second Barbara Pym of the year - Excellent Women. Another wonderful novel, I'm loving reading so far this year. This focus on just a few women writers from the last century is really enjoyable.

Having said that, our 'hero' in this story, Mildred Lathbury, makes me so mad, at times I just wanted to shake her! Especially when she goes downstairs to wash up and tidy up the Napers' flat, grrr!

Just like much of Stella, Barbara also is great at describing a London that no longer exists:

Julian smiled tolerantly at his sister's enthusiasm. 'Ah, well, I expect we shall know soon enough who has sent it. Probably one of our good ladies in Colchester or Grantchester Square.' He named the two most respectable squares in our district, where a few houses of the old type, occupied by one family or even one person and not yet cut up into flats, were to be found. My flat was in neither of these squares, but in a street on the fringe and at what I liked to think of as the 'best' end.

Just reminded me of someone I used to work with who described her home as being, not in Fulham, which is where it was, but instead as "Chelsea borders"...

Thanks again to @MyyearwithBarbara for sending me down this slight detour - how are you getting on?

I’ve said this before on the 50 Books thread, @Waawo, but Excellent Women was my gateway to Pym and I loved it so much that I promptly read everything by her. I’d been aware of her for literally years but was guilty of just thinking 'vicars and spinsters' and so swerved all her wonderful books. A terrible misapprehension on my part!