Gibbons, Stella (1902–1989)

British novelist and poet, best known as the author of Cold Comfort Farm. Name variations: Stella Webb. Born Stella Dorothea Gibbons on January 5, 1902, in London, England; died in December 1989 at age 87; eldest child of Telford Charles Gibbons (a north London doctor) and Maud Williams; educated at home by governesses until age 13, when she attended the North London Collegiate School; took journalism course at University College, London; married Allan Bourne Webb (an actor and opera singer), in 1933; children: a daughter.

Worked as a decoder for the British United Press; spent ten years in Fleet Street working on various jobs—literary and drama criticism, fashion writing, special reporting, while doing some creative writing of her own; published first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932), which brought her instant fame; over the next 40 years, wrote 25 novels, together with four volumes of poetry, and three collections of short stories (none, however, were to achieve the same success).

Selected works:

The Mountain Beast and Other Poems (1930); Cold Comfort Farm (1932); Bassett (1934); Nightingale Wood (1938); Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940); The Bachelor (1944); Gentle Powers (1946); Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1949); Collected Poems (1950); Here Be Dragons (1956); The Charmers (1965); Starlight (1967); The Snow Woman (1969); The Woods in Winter (1970).

Stella Gibbons did not have a happy childhood. Her father's medical practice was in a poor part of London, and the grinding poverty she saw around her, combined with the sterility of her family life, depressed the young girl. Not being allowed to go to school until she was in her teens did not help. As a means of escape, she made up fairy tales which she told to her two younger brothers. She also buried herself in books with exotic settings, such as Disraeli's Alroy and Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh. When she finally went to school, at age 13, she was no happier. In a very funny and clearly autobiographical passage at the beginning of Cold Comfort Farm, Flora Poste is asked by her friend how she managed to survive a school career of organized games without getting to like them:

Well—first of all, I used to stand quite still and stare at the trees and not think about anything.… But I found that people would bump into me, so I had to give up standing still and run after the ball like the others… until I found they didn't like me doing that, because I never got near it or hit it or did whatever you're supposed to do with it. So then I ran away from it instead, but they didn't seem to like that either.

And then a whole lot of them got at me one day after one of the games was over, and told me I was no good. And the Games Mistress seemed quite worried and asked me if I didn't really care about lacrosse… and what did I care about?

So I said, well, I was not quite sure, but on the whole I thought I liked having everything very tidy and calm all round me,… and going for country walks, and not being asked to express opinions about things (like love, and isn't so-and-so peculiar?)… and after that she left me alone. But all the others still said I was no good.

After graduating from a course in journalism in 1922, Gibbons embarked on what she later described as her life in "the vulgar and meaningless bustle of newspaper offices." She did admit, however, that working for the British United Press taught her to write, and reviewing novels encouraged her gift for satire. Nevertheless, she was clearly not enamored with the life of a press scribbler. As she wrote her friend and mentor, Antony Pookworthy, just after the completion of her first book:

The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style. You, who are so adept at the lovely polishing of every grave and lucent phrase, will realize the magnitude of the task which confronted me when I found, after spending ten years of my life as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favorable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.

For her first novel, Stella Gibbons decided to go for the burlesque, and the subject she chose to parody was the rural tradition in English literature.

The Romantic movement of the early 19th century—particularly the poetry of William Wordsworth—first postulated the idea of the harmony between man and nature. It was a reaction to the increasing mechanization and urbanization of English society and was inclined to romanticize country people and, at its worst, patronize and exploit them. This was not, however, a view held by perhaps the greatest of all 19th-century rural writers—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). Although believing that the landscape in which people lived could either be used as an illustration of human moods and feelings, or have human moods and feelings imposed upon it, he increasingly abandoned the idea of "the land" as tilled and cultivated by man as being a predominant symbol of harmony. It is indicative of the mood of a mainly urban readership that his last novel, Jude the Obscure, was intensely unpopular with a hitherto admiring public.

In the first decades of the 20th century, however, there was a string of lesser writers such as Sheila Kaye-Smith (1887–1956) and T.F. Powys (1875–1953), who nostalgically over-sentimentalized the rural world in purple passages or what Stella Gibbons described as "sheer flapdoodle." In her novel The Golden Arrow, Mary Webb had her lapses:

The sky blossomed in parterres of roses, frailer and brighter than the rose of the briar, and melted beneath them into lagoons greener and paler than the veins of a young beech-leaf. The fairy hedges were so high, so flushed with beauty, the green airy waters so far back into mystery, that it seemed as if at any moment God might walk there as in a garden, delicate as a moth.

The effect of such writing, as critic G. Cavaliero comments, leads "to a kind of clotted chaos… and self-indulgence, most clearly manifest in the sentimental transformation of God Himself into something suggestive of a pixie." (It should be stressed, however, that much of Mary Webb's prose is of a very high standard, and her books, particularly Precious Bane, 1924, convey a rich and intense impression of the Shropshire countryside, and a sense of impending doom not unlike the works of Hardy.)

Clearly such a style, together with the conventions of rural plot, characterization and atmospheric description, laid themselves open to satire. But Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm not only parodies the hackneyed purple passages (obligingly asterisked for the benefit of the "common reader"), but exercises a more serious criticism by causing her down-to-earth heroine, Flora Poste from smart metropolitan Lambeth, to reorganize the lives of that collective embodiment of rural literary mannerism, the Starkadder family. Such a character had long been anticipated by critics and reviewers. Katherine Mansfield , for instance wrote that she had:

grown very shy of dialect which is half prophecy, half potatoes, and more than a trifle impatient of over-wise old men, hotblooded young ones, beauties in faded calico, and scenes of passion in the kitchen while the dinner is hotting up or getting cold.

Stella Gibbons also takes a swipe at D.H. Lawrence (1885–1928), and others who saw rural working men and women as the embodiment of vigor, libido, and cultural alternative set amidst a countryside throbbing with dark passions and sexual undertones.

An acute and witty parody of the rural novel…, [Cold Comfort Farm] both makes and exploits the hysterical intrigue, emotional turmoil and lugubriousness of the genre.

—lan Ousley

Most rural novels of this period set the scene with atmospheric fantasy. Compare the opening lines of Nora Kent 's Barren Lands (1926):

Stilehouse Farm lay back from the road on the rising ground between Durham and Tarring Neville. The house, mellowed by age and the sun, stood foursquare to the salt winds blowing inland from the Channel.

with Flora Poste's first sight of the Starkadders' farm:

Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions of Cold Comfort Farm.

(This passage received two asterisks from the author.)

The Starkadder family that Flora encounters at the farm is a rural caricature. The matriarch, Aunt Ada Doom, rules the roost from the attic and only emerges twice a year for "the counting"—that is to make sure that none of her numerous progeny have left. Her only two phrases are "they'll always be Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm," and "there's something nasty in the woodshed"—an unexplained encounter counter she experienced when she was two (a phrase that has subsequently entered the English language, meaning something sinister in arcadia). Her son, Amos, is the quintessential fundamentalist preacher who weekly spits fire and brimstone to an appreciative audience in the appropriately named village of Howling—"Ye miserable, crawling worms, are ye here again then?… to hear me tellin' o' the great crimson lickin' flames o' hell fire?" His wife Judith suffers from some obscure and inconsolable sorrow, while her extensive brood of young men fight and intrigue and push each other down the well that never quite manages to get finished. Reuben, the stolid farmer, and Seth, the earthy womanizer ("I eats women," he says), are the most prominent sons in the book. In a passage marked with three asterisks, displaying shades of D.H. Lawrence and Emily Brontë 's Wuthering Heights, Stella Gibbons describes Seth's reaction to finding an interfering woman in his house:

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 his 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 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-path of the bull in his hour. All his, his…

All this about a character who ends the book by becoming a film star.

Other characters include Elfine, the daughter, who spends her time floating around the countryside in long dresses pretending to be a nymph; Mr. Myburg, an intellectual writer who sees sex and phallic shoots in every aspect of nature; and Adam the cowman who sits in the barn "coddling the 'dumb beasts'" (the cows, Graceless, Pointless, Feckless, and Aimless, with bull, Big Business).

Meanwhile:

The country for miles, under the blanket of the dark which brought no peace, was in its annual tortured ferment of spring growth; worm jarred with worm and seed with seed. Frond leapt on root and hare on hare. Beetle and finch-fly were not spared. The troutsperm in the muddy hollow under Nettle Flitch Weir were agitated, and well they might be.

Flora Poste's self-imposed task is to create order and "tidiness" amongst the heaving undercurrents of countryside life—which of course she does in her down-to-earth fashion over the space of 200 pages. Aunt Ada Doom is persuaded to embark on a round-the-world airplane trip; Amos goes to America in a Bedford van to convert the heathen; Stolid Reuben takes over the farm; passionate Seth becomes a film star and goes to Hollywood; Flighty Elfine stops being clever and marries the son of the local squire and cultivates an interest in horseflesh; and Adam continues to coddle his "dumb beasts" in pastures new.

Cold Comfort Farm remains a very funny book. Although it only damaged the more hackneyed rural novels of the day, it served as a warning to avoid absurdity or pretentiousness for writers attempting to describe a more elemental way of life. It has certainly outlived most of the books that were its occasion. A musical version in 1965, deriving its title from the most quoted line in the book, Something Nasty in the Woodshed, was also adapted for television in 1968. A film, directed by John Schlesinger and starring Kate Beckinsale , was released in 1996.

Stella Gibbons' success with this book came with a price, however. Nothing she subsequently wrote was regarded as its equal, and her later books suffered from the comparison, "like a mother with unusually precocious offspring who continually overshadows the quiet, worthy members of her brood," as one reviewer put it. Other critics felt that her later fiction, though well written, tended to dwindle into magazine entertainment.

Although she often saw herself as primarily a poet (her Collected Poems came out in 1950), Gibbons had marginally more success with her novels and stories. Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940) and Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, both collections of stories, attempted to capitalize on earlier successes. Many of her later novels were set in literary north London, which Gibbons knew well, and show a sharp eye for social contrasts. Two works, Gentle Powers and Here be Dragons, deal with a young woman's education and disillusionment.

For Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons received the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize, and she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. She continued to write until the year she died in December of 1989, at age 87.

sources:

Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel. Penguin Books, 1994.

Cavaliero, Glen. The Rural Tradition in The English Novel, 1900–1950. Macmillan Press, 1977.

Gibbons, Stella. Cold Comfort Farm. Penguin Books, 1932.

——. Gentle Powers. Penguin Books, 1946.

——. Here be Dragons. Penguin Books, 1956.

——. The Wood in Winter. Penguin Books, 1970.

suggested reading:

Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford University Press, 1989.

Drabble, Margaret. Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford University Press, 1991.

related media:

Something Nasty in the Woodshed, musical, 1965, British television version, 1968.

Cold Comfort Farm (8 cassettes, audio), read by Anna Massey , Sterling Audio, 1993.

Cold Comfort Farm, film starring Kate Beckinsale, Joanna Lumley, Maria Miles , Ian McKellen, and Stephen Fry, directed by John Schlesinger, released in 1996.

Christopher Gibb , writer and historian, London, England