Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. 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. 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 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.

But Victor’s intentions towards the young widow are, in short, not quite honorable.The daughter of a London medical doctor, Gibbons had a turbulent and often unhappy childhood. Only the prospect of the upcoming charity ball can lift her spirits especially as Victor Spring, the local prince charming, will be there. Withers dismisses her as a common shop girl and Viola’s sisters in law, Madge and Tina, are too preoccupied with their own troubles to give her much thought. Its occupants are nearly insufferable: Mr. Poor, lovely Viola has been left penniless and alone after her late husband’s demise, and is forced to live with his family in their joy less home.

Recommended for both literary and popular collections.Ī sly and satirical fairytale by the author of Cold Comfort Farm Unavailable for decades, Stella Gibbons’s Nightingale Wood is a delightfully modern romance ripe for rediscovery by the many fans of Cold Comfort Farm. Anne Massey’s skillful rendering of a variety of accents will make this story more accessible to American audiences. The other half is Gibbons’s wicked sendup of romantic cliches, from the mad woman in the attic to the druidical peasants with their West Country accents and mystical herbs. Flora’s confident and clever management of an alarming cast of eccentrics is only half the pleasure of this novel. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19, chooses to live with relatives at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex, where cows are named Feckless, Aimless, Pointless, and Graceless, and the proprietors, the dour Starkadder family, are tyrannized by Flora’s mysterious aunt, who controls the household from a locked room. In Gibbons’s classic tale, a resourceful young hero*ine finds herself in the gloomy, overwrought world of a Hardy or Bronte novel and proceeds to organize everyone out of their romantic tragedies into the pleasures of normal life.

Gibbons stella