Stella Gibbons
Encyclopedia
Stella Dorothea Gibbons (5 January 1902 – 19 December 1989) was an English novelist, journalist, poet, and short-story writer.
Her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm
, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize
for 1933. A satire and parody of the pessimistic ruralism of Thomas Hardy
, his followers and especially Precious Bane
by Mary Webb
—the "loam and lovechild" genre, as some called it—Cold Comfort Farm introduces a self-confident young woman, quite consciously modern, pragmatic, and optimistic, into the grim, fate-bound, and dark rural scene those novelists tended to portray.
where her father, a medical doctor, had his practice. She was initially home-educated, then attended the North London Collegiate School for Girls
.
Gibbons's own family was suburban and middle-class, but in some of its psychological dimensions is said to have been "not dissimilar to the Starkadders" described in that novel.
In her autobiographical novel Enbury Heath she describes her family life with two younger brothers, Gerald and Lewis, in the third person: "She grew up in the wreck of hope and the slow, strange living-death of love, but because she was conceived in love, she was the happiest of the three, and she never forgot it."
Her father was a "bad man, but a good doctor". Stella's mother Maudie was a retiring woman not able to stand up to the domineering spirit of her husband. Stella's father worked in a poor area of London and was a sympathetic doctor who would not charge patients that could not pay. Nevertheless, he was prone to violent outbursts against his wife and was a womaniser who was unfaithful with a number of governesses. In a fit of rage he once threw a knife at Maudie, and often resorted to whiskey and later laudanum to deal with his inner demons.
Stella's turbulent upbringing was to play a significant part in the creation of her most noted work Cold Comfort Farm.
When Stella was eleven her father threatened to commit suicide. Stella's mother begged her to stop him:
In 1926 Stella’s mother died, aged 48. During the funeral service Stella’s father, probably drunk, was heard to say of his wife: "Oh, she was a bitch! She never cooked properly! What I had to put up with!" Stella’s father died later in the same year, a death that was not regretted by his daughter.
From 1927 Stella lived with her two brothers in Vale Cottage in Hampstead Heath
. Stella was the main breadwinner at this time and somewhat resentful of her brothers for their spendthrift, dissolute ways. She also felt that her domestic efforts were taken for granted and unappreciated.
Gibbons later worked for the Evening Standard
, and then the Lady
. It was in 1928, while working for the Standard, that the novels of Mary Webb
enjoyed a resurgence in popularity thanks to the advocacy of the then Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin
. It was Gibbons' job to summarise the plot of Webb's novel The Golden Arrow, which was being serialised in the newspaper, for those readers who had missed the previous installment. Stella Gibbons was not a fan of Mary Webb.
In 1930 The Mountain Beast, a collection of Gibbons' poetry, was published. The collection was dedicated to Stella's mother. Her most widely known poems from this collection are 'The Giraffes', which was admired by Virginia Woolf
, and 'Coverings'. Although her poetry collection attracted considerable positive attention at the time of publication it, like much else in Gibbons' body of work, has now fallen into obscurity.
was published in 1932 and its success was immediate (although it was banned in the Irish Free State
because of its endorsement of contraception) and long-lived; its legacy over-shadowed all of her other writing while Gibbons was alive and after her death. In 1966 she wrote:
It is a novel that, amongst other things, satirises the somewhat overwrought works of authors such as Mary Webb, whose writing Gibbons encountered whilst working at the Standard.
In 1934 Stella Gibbons accepted the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse
at the Institut Français in London for Cold Comfort Farm. She received £40 and the opprobrium of the previously complimentary Virginia Woolf
(who had a friend who was also vying for the award): "I was enraged to see they gave the £40 to Gibbons.... Who is she? What is this book?"
Sequels to the book, published in 1940 and 1949, "did not have the same topicality or literary astringency as the original," nor the same popularity.
and Keats. Both writers are directly quoted in her first two books. Austen features as the epigraph to Cold Comfort Farm and Bassett, and Keats is quoted in Bassett: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections."
Three of Gibbons’ novels rework fairy tales. Nightingale Wood (1938) adapts Cinderella, My American (1939) adapts The Snow Queen, and White Sand and Grey Sand (1958) takes on Beauty and the Beast.
Ouida
was another influence on the writing of Gibbons. One critic thought Ticky (1943) was a parody of Ouida as Cold Comfort Farm had been a parody of Mary Webb, but she denied this.
Gibbons' body of work earned admiration from many respected writers and intellectuals, and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
in 1950. Most of her novels sold solidly and received positive reviews.
Gibbons herself claimed to be a poet rather than a novelist, "to lack interest in people (as opposed to ideas, nature, and the 'possible existence of God'), and to be handicapped for fiction by a distaste for emotional 'scenes'. Irony may lurk in such claims."
Stella Gibbons' novels show a fine eye for the awkwardness and conflicts when different social groups come into contact. She "writes of young love with that mixture of sensibility and romance unique to those who lived through both World Wars.... Gibbons also shows the condition – it is not dire enough to be called a plight – of middle-aged women with uncertain financial futures."
World War II
had a profound effect on Gibbons, and she was an active writer during this period. Many of her books from this time are published in "full conformity with the war economy standard", and it is this period of austerity which she writes about particularly well. Novels such as The Bachelor, Westwood and The Matchmaker "capture England’s grim winter existence during the last years of the war. Gibbons is at her best describing the painful ordinariness of life under siege."
Gibbons had a "rare ability to enter into the feelings of the uncommunicative and to bring to life the emotions of the unremarkable."
Her short stories are generally regarded as slight "much in the style of Katherine Mansfield
but too often without Mansfield’s incisive characterization", while her poetry tends "toward classic, even archaic, dictum, and only occasionally [does it] show flashes of the novels' wit."
Stella Gibbons first book after Cold Comfort Farm was Bassett (1933). The book deals with the nature of relationships, sexual and non-sexual. Two people of the same sex, apparently quite incompatible, find fulfilment together, while two young lovers do not. Linking both stories is the paradox that those who recognise their need for another are frequently more fulfilled and mature than the seemingly self-sufficient. The book is partly based on a relationship Gibbons had with Walter Beck between 1924 and 1928, and the Shelling family in the novel is strikingly similar to Beck's family. "[Walter Beck] was good-looking and rich, and he and Stella first met on the Heath. Beyond that, the facts available are scanty. Stella was engaged to Beck, and told her sister-in-law Renee that she committed herself sexually to the relationship and would go away with him to hotels at weekends. They would sign the register under false names and she would have to put on a wedding ring, an act she found peculiarly humiliating. Because Stella was deeply in love she tried to pretend that she found it all daring and exciting, but such a light-hearted attitude was alien to her." Stella ended the relationship in 1928. In the novel it is the Beck-figure that ends the affair.
Published in 1935, Enbury Heath is Gibbons most autobiographical novel: "only the thinnest veil of fictional gauze covers raw experience and transforms the book into a novel." Although the book lacks a strong narrative it describes the author's upbringing and her relationship with her two brothers in a way that Gibbons clearly felt was true for her.
In both Bassett and Enbury Heath Gibbons shows her skill at capturing the nuance of class conflict in day-to-day English life:
Gibbons' 1956 novel, Here Be Dragons, revolves around the intertwined fates of Nelly Sely, newly arrived from the country, and her cousin John, who is fully entrenched in London's bohemian underworld. Nell's father is a clergyman who has suffered a wobble of faith, her mother a brainy but frustrated housewife. John's parents are self-absorbed media types. Also of interest are Nell's debutante friend Elizabeth, John's bohemian associates, particularly the poet Benedict and his American girlfriend Gardis, and the young lovers Chris and Nerina, as well as the elderly Miss Lister and her cat Dandy. With its themes of bohemianism, post war readjustment, estraged families, national service, and changing family roles, Here Be Dragons paints a vivid picture of Britain's Forgotten Decade of 1945 to 1955, post war, pre-rock and roll
.
, Highgate
, where Gibbons was to live for the remainder of her life. They had one daughter. Webb came from a family with a strong religious background and although not a practising Christian at the time she wrote Cold Comfort Farm Gibbons was to become one after her marriage.
In October 1935 Gibbons gave birth to her only child, Laura. Later that year she published her only children’s book The Untidy Gnome which was dedicated to her daughter.
Gibbons' daughter married Joseph Richardson in 1957. The marriage produced two sons, Daniel and Benjamin.
In 1958 Webb was diagnosed with liver cancer. He died in July 1959.
Gibbons died in December 1989, in London. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery
next to her husband Allan. Her nephew, Reggie Oliver
, read two of Stella's poems, 'The Bel' and 'Fairford Church', at the funeral. Only a smattering of friends and family attended.
At the time of her death, The Observer
commented "It ought not to be forgotten that Miss Gibbons is a poet as well as a novelist... She handles sky, bare trees, and rough fields with the same quiet subtlety as people. She sees idiosyncrasy in nature and humanity, and makes both live".
Since her death, Stella Gibbons’ reputation has continued to rest on Cold Comfort Farm, although her other work continues to have a small circle of admirers. In 2009 Nightingale Wood was republished by Virago, with an introduction by Sophie Dahl. Reggie Oliver, in his biography of his famous Aunt, particularly puts the case for Nightingale Wood, The Bachelor, Westwood, and Starlight. Ticky also has its fans.
Her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm
Cold Comfort Farm
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb...
, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize
Prix Femina
The Prix Femina is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie heureuse . The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury, although the authors of the winning works do not have to be women...
for 1933. A satire and parody of the pessimistic ruralism of Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...
, his followers and especially Precious Bane
Precious Bane
Precious Bane is a novel by Mary Webb, first published in 1924. It won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse Prize.In 1957 it was made into a six part BBC television drama series starring Patrick Troughton and Daphne Slater...
by Mary Webb
Mary Webb
Mary Webb , was an English romantic novelist and poet of the early 20th century, whose work is set chiefly in the Shropshire countryside and among Shropshire characters and people which she knew. Her novels have been successfully dramatized, most notably the film Gone to Earth in 1950 by Michael...
—the "loam and lovechild" genre, as some called it—Cold Comfort Farm introduces a self-confident young woman, quite consciously modern, pragmatic, and optimistic, into the grim, fate-bound, and dark rural scene those novelists tended to portray.
Early life
Gibbons was born in London, the only daughter and eldest of three children of Telford Gibbons and his wife Maude Phoebe Standish Williams, and grew up in Kentish TownKentish Town
Kentish Town is an area of north west London, England in the London Borough of Camden.-History:The most widely accepted explanation of the name of Kentish Town is that it derived from 'Ken-ditch' meaning the 'bed of a waterway'...
where her father, a medical doctor, had his practice. She was initially home-educated, then attended the North London Collegiate School for Girls
North London Collegiate School
North London Collegiate School is an independent day school for girls founded in 1850 in Camden Town, and now in the London Borough of Harrow.The Good Schools Guide called the school an "Academically stunning outer London school in a glorious setting which, in 2003, demonstrated its refusal to rest...
.
Gibbons's own family was suburban and middle-class, but in some of its psychological dimensions is said to have been "not dissimilar to the Starkadders" described in that novel.
In her autobiographical novel Enbury Heath she describes her family life with two younger brothers, Gerald and Lewis, in the third person: "She grew up in the wreck of hope and the slow, strange living-death of love, but because she was conceived in love, she was the happiest of the three, and she never forgot it."
Her father was a "bad man, but a good doctor". Stella's mother Maudie was a retiring woman not able to stand up to the domineering spirit of her husband. Stella's father worked in a poor area of London and was a sympathetic doctor who would not charge patients that could not pay. Nevertheless, he was prone to violent outbursts against his wife and was a womaniser who was unfaithful with a number of governesses. In a fit of rage he once threw a knife at Maudie, and often resorted to whiskey and later laudanum to deal with his inner demons.
Stella's turbulent upbringing was to play a significant part in the creation of her most noted work Cold Comfort Farm.
When Stella was eleven her father threatened to commit suicide. Stella's mother begged her to stop him:
As the ranting went on Stella noticed that Telford had a slight smile on his face and was deriving a secret pleasure from the scene, much as an actor might do from tearing a passion to tatters. She was appalled. To suffer from a fit of despair was one thing; but actually enjoying causing a scene was quite another.
Early writing
Stella Gibbons began a two-year diploma in journalism in 1921, and secured employment with the British United Press in 1924 after a year without work. It was during this time that she began a relationship with Walter Beck, which was to form the basis of characters in her second novel Bassett.In 1926 Stella’s mother died, aged 48. During the funeral service Stella’s father, probably drunk, was heard to say of his wife: "Oh, she was a bitch! She never cooked properly! What I had to put up with!" Stella’s father died later in the same year, a death that was not regretted by his daughter.
From 1927 Stella lived with her two brothers in Vale Cottage in Hampstead Heath
Hampstead Heath
Hampstead Heath is a large, ancient London park, covering . This grassy public space sits astride a sandy ridge, one of the highest points in London, running from Hampstead to Highgate, which rests on a band of London clay...
. Stella was the main breadwinner at this time and somewhat resentful of her brothers for their spendthrift, dissolute ways. She also felt that her domestic efforts were taken for granted and unappreciated.
Gibbons later worked for the Evening Standard
Evening Standard
The Evening Standard, now styled the London Evening Standard, is a free local daily newspaper, published Monday–Friday in tabloid format in London. It is the dominant regional evening paper for London and the surrounding area, with coverage of national and international news and City of London...
, and then the Lady
The Lady (magazine)
The Lady is Britain's oldest weekly women's magazine. It has been in continuous publication since 1885 and is based in London. It is particularly notable for its classified advertisements for domestic service and child care; it also has extensive listings of holiday properties.The magazine was...
. It was in 1928, while working for the Standard, that the novels of Mary Webb
Mary Webb
Mary Webb , was an English romantic novelist and poet of the early 20th century, whose work is set chiefly in the Shropshire countryside and among Shropshire characters and people which she knew. Her novels have been successfully dramatized, most notably the film Gone to Earth in 1950 by Michael...
enjoyed a resurgence in popularity thanks to the advocacy of the then Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, KG, PC was a British Conservative politician, who dominated the government in his country between the two world wars...
. It was Gibbons' job to summarise the plot of Webb's novel The Golden Arrow, which was being serialised in the newspaper, for those readers who had missed the previous installment. Stella Gibbons was not a fan of Mary Webb.
In 1930 The Mountain Beast, a collection of Gibbons' poetry, was published. The collection was dedicated to Stella's mother. Her most widely known poems from this collection are 'The Giraffes', which was admired by Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
, and 'Coverings'. Although her poetry collection attracted considerable positive attention at the time of publication it, like much else in Gibbons' body of work, has now fallen into obscurity.
Cold Comfort Farm
Cold Comfort FarmCold Comfort Farm
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb...
was published in 1932 and its success was immediate (although it was banned in the Irish Free State
Irish Free State
The Irish Free State was the state established as a Dominion on 6 December 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed by the British government and Irish representatives exactly twelve months beforehand...
because of its endorsement of contraception) and long-lived; its legacy over-shadowed all of her other writing while Gibbons was alive and after her death. In 1966 she wrote:
Cold Comfort Farm is a member of my family; he is like some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but who is often an embarrassment and a bore.
It is a novel that, amongst other things, satirises the somewhat overwrought works of authors such as Mary Webb, whose writing Gibbons encountered whilst working at the Standard.
In 1934 Stella Gibbons accepted the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse
Prix Femina
The Prix Femina is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie heureuse . The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury, although the authors of the winning works do not have to be women...
at the Institut Français in London for Cold Comfort Farm. She received £40 and the opprobrium of the previously complimentary Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
(who had a friend who was also vying for the award): "I was enraged to see they gave the £40 to Gibbons.... Who is she? What is this book?"
Sequels to the book, published in 1940 and 1949, "did not have the same topicality or literary astringency as the original," nor the same popularity.
Influences
Stella Gibbons admired Jane AustenJane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
and Keats. Both writers are directly quoted in her first two books. Austen features as the epigraph to Cold Comfort Farm and Bassett, and Keats is quoted in Bassett: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections."
Three of Gibbons’ novels rework fairy tales. Nightingale Wood (1938) adapts Cinderella, My American (1939) adapts The Snow Queen, and White Sand and Grey Sand (1958) takes on Beauty and the Beast.
Ouida
Ouida
Ouida was the pseudonym of the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé .-Biography:...
was another influence on the writing of Gibbons. One critic thought Ticky (1943) was a parody of Ouida as Cold Comfort Farm had been a parody of Mary Webb, but she denied this.
Other writing
While Stella Gibbons is now known, if at all, as the author of Cold Comfort Farm she, "[i]n fact, [was] the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short-stories, and four volumes of poetry – most of them refreshing, original, and good enough to reward re-reading."Gibbons' body of work earned admiration from many respected writers and intellectuals, and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
Royal Society of Literature
The Royal Society of Literature is the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by George IV, in order to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". The Society's first president was Thomas Burgess, who later became the Bishop of Salisbury...
in 1950. Most of her novels sold solidly and received positive reviews.
Gibbons herself claimed to be a poet rather than a novelist, "to lack interest in people (as opposed to ideas, nature, and the 'possible existence of God'), and to be handicapped for fiction by a distaste for emotional 'scenes'. Irony may lurk in such claims."
Stella Gibbons' novels show a fine eye for the awkwardness and conflicts when different social groups come into contact. She "writes of young love with that mixture of sensibility and romance unique to those who lived through both World Wars.... Gibbons also shows the condition – it is not dire enough to be called a plight – of middle-aged women with uncertain financial futures."
World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
had a profound effect on Gibbons, and she was an active writer during this period. Many of her books from this time are published in "full conformity with the war economy standard", and it is this period of austerity which she writes about particularly well. Novels such as The Bachelor, Westwood and The Matchmaker "capture England’s grim winter existence during the last years of the war. Gibbons is at her best describing the painful ordinariness of life under siege."
Gibbons had a "rare ability to enter into the feelings of the uncommunicative and to bring to life the emotions of the unremarkable."
Her short stories are generally regarded as slight "much in the style of Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and...
but too often without Mansfield’s incisive characterization", while her poetry tends "toward classic, even archaic, dictum, and only occasionally [does it] show flashes of the novels' wit."
Stella Gibbons first book after Cold Comfort Farm was Bassett (1933). The book deals with the nature of relationships, sexual and non-sexual. Two people of the same sex, apparently quite incompatible, find fulfilment together, while two young lovers do not. Linking both stories is the paradox that those who recognise their need for another are frequently more fulfilled and mature than the seemingly self-sufficient. The book is partly based on a relationship Gibbons had with Walter Beck between 1924 and 1928, and the Shelling family in the novel is strikingly similar to Beck's family. "[Walter Beck] was good-looking and rich, and he and Stella first met on the Heath. Beyond that, the facts available are scanty. Stella was engaged to Beck, and told her sister-in-law Renee that she committed herself sexually to the relationship and would go away with him to hotels at weekends. They would sign the register under false names and she would have to put on a wedding ring, an act she found peculiarly humiliating. Because Stella was deeply in love she tried to pretend that she found it all daring and exciting, but such a light-hearted attitude was alien to her." Stella ended the relationship in 1928. In the novel it is the Beck-figure that ends the affair.
Published in 1935, Enbury Heath is Gibbons most autobiographical novel: "only the thinnest veil of fictional gauze covers raw experience and transforms the book into a novel." Although the book lacks a strong narrative it describes the author's upbringing and her relationship with her two brothers in a way that Gibbons clearly felt was true for her.
In both Bassett and Enbury Heath Gibbons shows her skill at capturing the nuance of class conflict in day-to-day English life:
"If this interview had been taking place thirty years ago, Miss Padsoe would have been interviewing Miss Baker as a prospective house parlour-maid, and Miss Baker would have been m’ming her. The War, a bared sword, lay between 1903 and 1933, but Miss Padsoe had never quite taken in the War, somehow. She missed the m’ming." (Bassett)
"Maysie tells me you write poetry," said Mrs Kellett. "Do have another tomato."
"Yes," murmured Sophia. "No thank you."
"That’s very clever," said Mrs Kellet, rather as a missionary might congratulate an aborigine on his skill at throwing the boomerang. (Enbury Heath)
Gibbons' 1956 novel, Here Be Dragons, revolves around the intertwined fates of Nelly Sely, newly arrived from the country, and her cousin John, who is fully entrenched in London's bohemian underworld. Nell's father is a clergyman who has suffered a wobble of faith, her mother a brainy but frustrated housewife. John's parents are self-absorbed media types. Also of interest are Nell's debutante friend Elizabeth, John's bohemian associates, particularly the poet Benedict and his American girlfriend Gardis, and the young lovers Chris and Nerina, as well as the elderly Miss Lister and her cat Dandy. With its themes of bohemianism, post war readjustment, estraged families, national service, and changing family roles, Here Be Dragons paints a vivid picture of Britain's Forgotten Decade of 1945 to 1955, post war, pre-rock and roll
Rock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...
.
Family life
Gibbons married actor and singer Allan Webb in 1933. They moved to a house on the Holly Lodge EstateHolly Lodge Estate
The Holly Lodge Estate is an estate located on the site and grounds of a villa built in 1798 by Sir Henry Tempest on the south-facing slopes of Highgate, London adjacent to Highgate Rise, now known as Highgate West Hill...
, Highgate
Highgate
Highgate is an area of North London on the north-eastern corner of Hampstead Heath.Highgate is one of the most expensive London suburbs in which to live. It has an active conservation body, the Highgate Society, to protect its character....
, where Gibbons was to live for the remainder of her life. They had one daughter. Webb came from a family with a strong religious background and although not a practising Christian at the time she wrote Cold Comfort Farm Gibbons was to become one after her marriage.
In October 1935 Gibbons gave birth to her only child, Laura. Later that year she published her only children’s book The Untidy Gnome which was dedicated to her daughter.
Gibbons' daughter married Joseph Richardson in 1957. The marriage produced two sons, Daniel and Benjamin.
In 1958 Webb was diagnosed with liver cancer. He died in July 1959.
Final years
After 1972 Stella Gibbons published no further work. In the years up to her death in 1989 she wrote two unpublished novels, The Yellow Houses and An Alpha. The death of her husband in 1959 had gradually brought her to withdraw from the public sphere and concentrate on her grandchildren.Gibbons died in December 1989, in London. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery
Highgate Cemetery
Highgate Cemetery is a cemetery located in north London, England. It is designated Grade I on the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England. It is divided into two parts, named the East and West cemetery....
next to her husband Allan. Her nephew, Reggie Oliver
Reggie Oliver
Reggie Oliver is an English playwright, biographer and writer of ghost stories.-Life and career:Reggie Oliver was educated at Eton and University College, Oxford , and has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975.He has worked in radio, television, films, and...
, read two of Stella's poems, 'The Bel' and 'Fairford Church', at the funeral. Only a smattering of friends and family attended.
At the time of her death, The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
commented "It ought not to be forgotten that Miss Gibbons is a poet as well as a novelist... She handles sky, bare trees, and rough fields with the same quiet subtlety as people. She sees idiosyncrasy in nature and humanity, and makes both live".
Since her death, Stella Gibbons’ reputation has continued to rest on Cold Comfort Farm, although her other work continues to have a small circle of admirers. In 2009 Nightingale Wood was republished by Virago, with an introduction by Sophie Dahl. Reggie Oliver, in his biography of his famous Aunt, particularly puts the case for Nightingale Wood, The Bachelor, Westwood, and Starlight. Ticky also has its fans.
External links
- Stella Gibbons – old official site, via Internet Archive, by Reggie OliverReggie OliverReggie Oliver is an English playwright, biographer and writer of ghost stories.-Life and career:Reggie Oliver was educated at Eton and University College, Oxford , and has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975.He has worked in radio, television, films, and...