87-537: Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by English author 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 . The novel was awarded the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1933. Following the death of her parents, the book's heroine, Flora Poste, finds she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She decides to take advantage of
174-510: A Lady article as "one of the most exquisite" of woman artists. After the war, Allan Webb resumed his stage career with the role of Count Almaviva in the 1946 Sadler's Wells production of The Marriage of Figaro . In 1947 he appeared in the original run of the Vivian Ellis musical Bless the Bride , and made several further stage appearances in the following two years. During this time he had
261-574: A commonplace book in which she was recording her thoughts and opinions on literature as late as 1988. From the mid-1980s Gibbons experienced recurrent health problems, not helped when she resumed smoking. In her last months she was looked after at home by her grandson and his girlfriend. She died there on 19 December 1989, after collapsing the previous day, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery , alongside her husband. At her funeral, her nephew and future biographer Reggie Oliver read two of her poems,
348-470: A literary canon. Because she was a woman who wrote amusingly, she was classified as "middlebrow"; furthermore, she was published by Longmans, a non-literary publisher. Her lampooning of the literary establishment in the spoof dedication of Cold Comfort Farm to one "Anthony Pookworthy" did not amuse that establishment, who were further offended by the book's mockery of the writing of such canonical figures as Lawrence and Hardy—hence Virginia Woolf's reaction to
435-499: A Sorcerer (1955). From 1954, having accepted an invitation from Malcolm Muggeridge , the editor of Punch , Gibbons provided frequent contributions to the magazine for the following 15 years. Among these was a science fiction story, "Jane in Space", written in the style of Jane Austen . Gibbons, who wrote the introduction to the 1957 Heritage edition of Sense and Sensibility , was a long-time admirer of Austen, and had described her in
522-593: A brief affair with the actress Sydney Malcolm, for which Gibbons quickly forgave him. He left the theatre in 1949 to become a director of a book club specialising in special editions, and later bought a bookshop in the Archway district of London. His health failed in the late 1950s and in 1958 he was diagnosed with cancer of the liver. He died in July 1959 at Oakshott Avenue. After Webb's death, Gibbons remained at Oakshott Avenue and continued to write novels. From 1961 she rented
609-564: A critical summary of Gibbons's poems, Loralee MacPike has described them as "slight lyrics ... [which] tend toward classic, even archaic, diction, and only occasionally ... show flashes of the novels' wit". Such lines as "my thoughts, like purple parrots / Brood / In the sick light" come dangerously close indeed to the overblown rhetoric she satirized in Cold Comfort Farm : "How like yaks were your drowsy thoughts". The immediate and enduring success of Cold Comfort Farm dominated
696-405: A different course, attended some of the same lectures. The two shared a love of literature and a taste for subversive humour. Graves lived until 1999, and recalled in an interview late in life that many of the jokes they shared found their way into Cold Comfort Farm , as did some of their common acquaintances. Soon after Gibbons began the course she contributed a poem, "The Marshes of My Soul", to
783-633: A dour satisfaction out of managing the rations, salvaging, fire watching, and feeling that I am trying to work for a better world". In July 1940 her husband Allan Webb enlisted in the Middlesex Regiment , and the following year was commissioned into the King's Royal Rifle Corps . He later served overseas, mostly in Cairo . The title story in Gibbons's 1940 collection, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm , failed to equal
870-540: A favourable review in The Times Literary Supplement . Oliver surmises that "the middle of the Second World War was perhaps the wrong time to satirise ... the ridiculous and dangerous rituals that surround the male aggressive instinct". The Bachelor won critical praise for its revealing account of life in war-torn Britain—as did several of Gibbons's postwar novels. Gibbons's first postwar novel
957-503: A literary magazine edited by T. S. Eliot . This work was read and admired by Virginia Woolf , who enquired if Gibbons would write poems for the Woolf publishing house, the Hogarth Press . In January 1928 J. C. Squire , a leading voice in the "Georgian" poetry movement, began to publish Gibbons's poems in his magazine, The London Mercury . Squire also persuaded Longmans to publish
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#17328848327881044-487: A modest revival in the 21st century. The daughter of a London doctor, Gibbons had a turbulent and often unhappy childhood. 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 . Her first book, published in 1930, was a collection of poems which was well received, and through her life she considered herself primarily
1131-616: A naturalised German employed by his family's cosmetics firm. The couple became engaged, and enjoyed regular weekends together, signing hotel registers as a married couple using false names. In May 1926 Gibbons's mother, Maude, died suddenly at the age of 48. With little reason to remain with her father in the Kentish Town surgery, Gibbons took lodgings in Willow Road, near Hampstead Heath . Five months later, on 15 October, her father died from heart disease aggravated by heavy drinking. Gibbons
1218-426: A parody was the work of a scarcely known woman writer, and speculated that "Stella Gibbons" was a pen-name for Evelyn Waugh . Gibbons suddenly found herself in demand in literary circles and from fellow writers, raised to a celebrity status that she found distasteful. She acquired an agent, who advised her that she could confidently expect a regular and comfortable income as a novelist. This assurance prompted her, at
1305-624: A poet rather than a novelist. 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. Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Her style has been praised by critics for its charm, barbed humour and descriptive skill, and has led to comparison with Jane Austen . The impact of Cold Comfort Farm dominated her career, and she grew to resent her identification with
1392-694: A repetition of the earlier masterpiece. Enbury Heath (1935) is a relatively faithful account of her childhood and early adult life with, according to Oliver, "only the thinnest veil of fictional gauze cover[ing] raw experience". Miss Linsey and Pa (1936) was thought by Nicola Beauman, in her analysis of women writers from 1914 to 1939, to parody Radclyffe Hall 's 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness . Gibbons's final prewar novels were Nightingale Wood (1935)—"Cinderella brought right up to date"—and My American (1939), which Oliver considers her most escapist novel, "a variant of Hans Christian Andersen 's The Snow Queen ." Gibbons always considered herself
1479-526: A reputation as a caustic book reviewer, and was particularly critical of the then fashionable "loam and lovechild" rural novels. Novelists such as Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith had achieved considerable popularity through their depictions of country life; Webb was a favourite of the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin . Gibbons had first become familiar with the genre when she provided summaries of Webb's The Golden Arrow for
1566-514: A serious poet rather than a comic writer. She published two collections of poetry in the 1930s, the latter of which, The Lowland Verses (1938) contains "The Marriage of the Machine", an early lament on the effects of industrial pollution: "What oil, what poison lulls/Your wings and webs, my cormorants and gulls?" Gibbons's single children's book was the fairy tale collection The Untidy Gnome , published in 1935 and dedicated to her only child Laura, who
1653-471: A stockbroker. The couple bought a house in Malden Crescent, Kentish Town , a working-class district of North London, where Telford established the medical practice in which he continued for the remainder of his life. Stella, the couple's first child, was born on 5 January 1902; two brothers, Gerald and Lewis, followed in 1905 and 1909 respectively. The atmosphere in the Kentish Town house echoed that of
1740-505: A summer house at Trevone in Cornwall, which became the setting for her 1962 novel The Weather at Tregulla . She returned to literary criticism after many years, when in 1965 she contributed an essay to Light on C.S. Lewis , a review of that writer 's work edited by Jocelyn Gibb. In 1966 she wrote an essay for Punch , "Genesis of a Novel", in which she mused on the detrimental effect of Cold Comfort Farm on her long-term career. She likened
1827-671: A young woman who was said to be very clever and had won an important literary prize. But she couldn't get on with it at all. It was about life on a farm, but the girl obviously knew nothing about country life. To anyone who, like herself, had always lived in the country, the whole thing was too ridiculous and impossible for words. Elizabeth Janeway responded to the lush ruralism of Laurie Lee 's memoir Cider with Rosie by suggesting an astringent counterblast might be found by "looking for an old copy of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm ". In order of appearance: In London: In Howling village Sussex: Animals at Cold Comfort Farm: Although
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#17328848327881914-410: Is happy or not but which, I dare to say, is very unsatisfactory to those who love Marianne ... If I have not spoken of Colonel Brandon it is because I do not care to." From Gibbons's "Introduction" to a 1957 reissue of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility . In 1950 Gibbons published her Collected Poems , and in the same year was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature . Throughout
2001-751: Is modelled on Dormer House in Webb's The House in Dormer Forest , and Aunt Ada Doom on Mrs. Velindre in the same book. The farm-obsessed Reuben's original is in Kaye-Smith's Sussex Gorse , and the Quivering Brethren on the Colgate Brethren in Kaye-Smith's Susan Spray . Others see John Cowper Powys 's rural mysticism as a further target, as featured in his Wessex novel Wolf Solent (1929): "He felt as if he enjoyed at that hour some primitive life-feeling that
2088-441: Is typical in a certain genre of romantic 19th-century and early 20th-century literature, each of the farm's inhabitants has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred, or fear, and the farm is badly run. Flora, being a level-headed, urban woman in the dandy tradition, determines that she must apply modern common sense to their problems and help them adapt to the 20th century – bringing metropolitan values into
2175-493: The Authors Guild , addressing lawmakers about copyright protection and other matters. Many of Janeway's early works focused on the family situation, with occasional glimpses at the struggles of women in modern society. In the early 1970s, she began a more explicitly feminist path with works such as Man's World, Woman's Place: A Study of Social Mythology. She befriended Betty Friedan , Gloria Steinem , and Kate Millett , and
2262-561: The BBC , and contributed three new poems to Richard Adams 's 1986 anthology Occasional Poets , a work which included verses from part-time poets such as Iris Murdoch , William Golding , Alan Ayckbourn and Quentin Crisp . These were Gibbons's last published works. One of Gibbons's poems in the anthology was "Writ in Water", inspired by her love for the poetry of Keats. In 2013 the manuscript of this poem
2349-569: The Barnard Medal of Distinction . Elizabeth Hall Janeway died in 2005 at her Rye, New York home. She was survived by two sons: Columbia Graduate School of Journalism professor, The Boston Globe editor, and former Atlantic Monthly executive Michael Janeway and William H. Janeway , until 2006 a vice chairman at Warburg Pincus , as well as by three grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. The Star Trek: Voyager character Kathryn Janeway originally shared her name, but writers changed
2436-457: The Evening Standard's 1928 serialisation. She found the writing overblown and the plotting ridiculous, and decided that her own first novel would be a comic parody of the genre. By February 1932 she had completed the manuscript and delivered it to her publishers, Longmans. "Every year, in the fulness o' summer, when the sukebind hangs heavy from the wains ... 'tes the same. And when
2523-518: The First World War , but attracted several women, among them the future novelist Elizabeth Bowen . As well as English Literature, the curriculum covered economics, politics, history, science and languages; practical skills such as shorthand and typing were not included. After the stifling experience of school, Gibbons found university exhilarating and made numerous friendships, particularly with Ida Affleck Graves , an aspiring poet who, although on
2610-531: The Prix Étranger winners from the inter-war years, only Cold Comfort Farm and Woolf's To the Lighthouse are remembered today, and that only the former has bequeathed a phrase that has passed into common usage: "something nasty in the woodshed". During the remainder of the 1930s Gibbons produced five more novels, as well as two poetry collections, a children's book, and a number of short stories. From November 1936
2697-597: The Prix Étranger award. Her belief in what she called "the gentle powers (Pity, Affection, Time, Beauty, Laughter)" also flew in the face of a disillusioned modernism . The literary critic John Carey suggests that the abandonment by intellectuals of "the clerks and the suburbs" as subjects of literary interest provided an opening for writers prepared to exploit this underexplored area. He considers John Betjeman and Stevie Smith as two writers who successfully achieved this. Hammill believes that Gibbons should be named alongside these two, since in her writings she rejects
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2784-520: The Prix Étranger , the foreign novel category of the prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Femina . It had won against works by two more experienced writers, Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann . This outcome irritated Virginia Woolf, herself a former Prix Étranger winner, who wrote to Bowen: "I was enraged to see they gave the £40 (the cash value of the prize) to Gibbons; still, now you and Rosamond can join in blaming her". Cooke observes that of all
2871-471: The 1930s, Juliet Gardiner ascribes a socio-economic dimension to the book: "a picture of rural gloom caused by government lassitude and urban indifference". The work was an immediate critical and popular success. The satire was heightened by Gibbons's mockery of purple prose , whereby she marked the most florid and overwritten passages of the book with asterisks, "for the reader's delectation and mirth". One critic found it hard to accept that so well-developed
2958-546: The 1950s she continued, at roughly two-year intervals, to produce politely received novels, none of which created any particular stir. Among these was Fort of the Bear (1953), in which she departed from her familiar London milieu by setting the story largely in the wilder regions of Canada. This was the last of her books handled by Longmans; thereafter her work was published by Hodder and Stoughton. A journey to Austria and Venice in 1953 provided material for her novel The Shadow of
3045-516: The December 1921 issue of University College Magazine . This parody, in the newly fashionable vers libre style, was her first published literary work. During the next two years she contributed further poems and prose to the magazine, including "The Doer, a Story in the Russian Manner", which foreshadows her later novels in both theme and style. Gibbons completed her course in the summer of 1923, and
3132-452: The Means Test ." Her philistine grandmother is dismayed: she prefers "cosy" rural novels, and knows Lucia is ignorant of proletarian life: That silly child! Did she really think she could write a novel? Well, of course, modern novels might encourage her to think so. There was nothing written nowadays worth reading. The book on her knee was called Cold Comfort Farm and had been written by
3219-456: The Starkadders". It is, observed Neville, an irony that the overheated melodrama that Gibbons most disliked was at the heart of her one great success; Gibbons's writings on everyday life brought her restrained approval, but no noticeable literary recognition. Nevertheless, her straightforward, style, unadorned except in parody, is admired by Rachel Cooke, who praises her as "a sworn enemy of
3306-471: The academic English Literature world ought to be high, her literary status is indeterminate. She did not promote herself, and was indifferent to the attractions of public life: "I'm not shy", she told Oliver, "I'm just unsociable". Truss records that Gibbons had "overtly rejected the literary world ... she didn't move in literary circles, or even visit literary squares, or love in literary triangles". Truss posits further reasons why Gibbons did not become
3393-482: The book continued to be lauded by successive generations of critics, Boston described it as "one of those rare books of comic genius that imprints itself on the brain and can never afterwards be eradicated". A more negative view of the book has been expressed by the literary critic Mary Beard , who considers it "a rather controlling victory of modern order, cleanliness, contraception and medicine over these messy, different, rural types ... I found myself screaming for
3480-474: The book to "some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but is often an embarrassment and a bore". Gibbons made her last overseas trip in 1966, to Grenoble in France where she visited her old friend Elizabeth Coxhead. This visit provided material for her 1968 novel The Snow Woman in which Gibbons overcame her habitual distaste for emotional excess by opening
3567-554: The book to the exclusion of the rest of her output. Widely regarded as a one-work novelist, she and her works have not been accepted into the canon of English literature—partly, other writers have suggested, because of her detachment from the literary world and her tendency to mock it. The Gibbons family originated from Ireland. Stella's grandfather, Charles Preston Gibbons, was a civil engineer who spent long periods in South Africa building bridges. He and his wife Alice had six children,
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3654-420: The book was published in 1932, the setting is an unspecified near future, shortly after the "Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of 1946". It refers to future social and demographic changes, such as the changing neighbourhoods of London: Mayfair has become a slum and Lambeth is fashionable. The book contains technological developments that Gibbons thought might have been invented by then, such as TV phones and air-taxis, so
3741-472: The book with a melodramatic birth on a sofa. The Woods in Winter (1970) was her last published novel; she decided at that point that she was no longer prepared to subject her work to editorial control. In the 1980s she wrote two more novels for private circulation among friends, The Yellow Houses and An Alpha . These books – An Alpha retitled Pure Juliet – were published by Vintage Classics in 2016, after
3828-493: The book's 2011 reprint, Lynne Truss describes it as "a rich, mature novel, romantic and wistful, full of rounded characters and terrific dialogue" that deserved more commercial success than it received. The public's expectations were still prejudiced by Cold Comfort Farm , which by 1949 had sold 28,000 copies in hardback and 315,000 in paperback. Anticipating that a sequel would be popular, that year Gibbons produced Conference at Cold Comfort Farm , her shortest novel, in which
3915-513: The books have been reissued, usually by different publishers. Elizabeth Janeway Elizabeth Janeway (née Hall ) (October 7, 1913 – January 15, 2005) was an American author and critic. Born Elizabeth Ames Hall in Brooklyn , New York, her naval architect father and homemaker mother fell on hard times during the Depression , leading her to end her Swarthmore College education and help support
4002-742: The calculation and reporting of foreign exchange rates, Gibbons was sacked from the BUP, but quickly found a new position as secretary to the editor of the London Evening Standard . Within a short time she was promoted, and became a reporter and features writer at the then substantial salary of just under £500 a year, although she was not given a by-line until 1928. During her Evening Standard years, Gibbons persevered with poetry, and in September 1927 her poem "The Giraffes" appeared in The Criterion ,
4089-509: The company. Janeway finally finished Girls in 1943 while awaiting the birth of her second child; she signed the contract with the publishers while en route to the hospital. A later novel, 1949's The Question of Gregory, attracted attention due to the eerie similarities between Gregory and James Forrestal , a defense secretary and acquaintance of the Janeways who committed suicide. Janeway denied any connection between fact and fiction; she said
4176-469: The elder Gibbons's household, and was dominated by Telford's frequent bouts of ill-temper, drinking, womanising and occasional acts of violence. Stella later described her father as "a bad man, but a good doctor". He was charitable to his poorer patients and imaginative in finding cures, but made life miserable for his family. Initially Stella was his favourite, but by the time she reached puberty he frequently mocked her looks and size. Fortunately, her mother
4263-518: The end of 1932, to resign her position with The Lady and to embark on a full-time writing career. In March 1931 Gibbons had become engaged to Allan Webb, a budding actor and opera singer five years her junior. He was the son of a cricketing parson , and the grandson of Allan Becher Webb , a former Bishop of Bloemfontein who served as Dean of Salisbury Cathedral . On 1 April 1933 the couple were married at St Matthew's, Bayswater . Later in 1933 she learned that Cold Comfort Farm had been awarded
4350-497: The fact that "no limits are set, either by society or one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose on one's relatives", and settles on visiting her distant relatives at the isolated Cold Comfort Farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex . The inhabitants of the farm – Aunt Ada Doom, the Starkadders, and their extended family and workers – feel obliged to take her in to atone for an unspecified wrong once done to her father. As
4437-522: The family by creating bargain-basement sale slogans (she graduated from Barnard College just a few years later, in 1935). Intent on becoming an author, Janeway took the same creative writing class again and again to help hone her craft. While working on her first novel, The Walsh Girls , she met and married Eliot Janeway , a much-quoted economist, who was to enjoy some influence with Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson (he
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#17328848327884524-558: The family home was in Oakshott Avenue, on the Holly Lodge Estate off Highgate West Hill , where Gibbons regularly worked in the mornings from ten until lunchtime. Her novels were generally well received by critics and the public, though none earned the accolades or attention that had been given to Cold Comfort Farm ; readers of The Times were specifically warned not to expect Gibbons's second novel, Bassett (1934), to be
4611-485: The farm has become a conference centre and tourist attraction. There is much mockery of contemporary and indeed future artistic and intellectual trends, before the male Starkadders return from overseas, wreck the centre and restore the farm to its original primitive state. The book was moderately successful but, Oliver remarks, does not compare with the original. "The shapely story is guided to an ending which satisfies those readers (if such there be) who care whether Elinor
4698-519: The first collection of Gibbons's verses, entitled The Mountain Beast , which appeared in 1930 to critical approval. By this time her by-line was appearing with increasing frequency in the Standard . As part of a series on "Unusual Women" she interviewed, among others, the former royal mistress Lillie Langtry . The paper also published several of Gibbons's short stories. Despite this evident industry, Gibbons
4785-501: The flatulent, the pompous and the excessively sentimental." While short of sentimentality, Gibbons's writing, in prose or verse, did not lack sensitivity. She had what one analyst described as "a rare ability to enter into the feelings of the uncommunicative and to bring to life the emotions of the unremarkable". Some of Gibbons's poetry expressed her love of nature and a prophetic awareness for environmental issues such as sea pollution, decades before such concerns became fashionable. In
4872-505: The impact of the original. When the collection was reissued many years later it was described as "oddly comforting and amusing ... and possibly a truer depiction of the times than we might think". Gibbons published three novels during the war: The Rich House (1941), Ticky (1942) and The Bachelor (1944). Ticky , a satire on mid-nineteenth century army life, was Gibbons's favourite of all her novels, although she acknowledged that hardly anyone liked it. It failed commercially, despite
4959-493: The importance that Gibbons places on detachment as a necessary adjunct to effective writing: "Like many a good doctor, she seems to have considered sympathy a peculiar and redundant emotion, and a terrible waste of time." This matter-of-fact quality in her prose might, according to Gibbons's Guardian obituarist Richard Boston , be a reaction against the turbulent and sometimes violent emotions that she witnessed within her own family who, she said, "were all madly highly-sexed, like
5046-528: The latter of which, "Fairford Church", concludes with the words: "Little is sure. Life is hard./We love, we suffer and die./But the beauty of the earth is real/And the Spirit is nigh." Gibbons's writing has been praised by critics for its perspicacity, sense of fun, charm, wit and descriptive skill—the last a product of her journalistic training—which she used to convey both atmosphere and character. Although Beauman refers to "malicious wit", Truss sees no cruelty in
5133-453: The mainstream of metropolitan literary life, and from time to time mock it. After many years in which almost all of Gibbons's output has been out of print, in 2011 the publishers Vintage Classics reissued paperback versions of Westwood , Starlight , and Conference at Cold Comfort Farm . They also announced plans to publish 11 of the other novels, on a print-on-demand basis. Publisher information relates to first publication only. Many of
5220-531: The manuscripts were released by Gibbons's family. The last two decades of Gibbons's life were uneventful and lived almost entirely beyond the public eye. She kept her health and looks until almost the end of her life—in a biographical sketch, Jill Neville recorded that "her beauty endured, as did her upright carriage, typical of Edwardian ladies who were forced as girls to walk around with a book balanced on their heads." As well as her unpublished novels she wrote occasional short stories, two of which were rejected by
5307-592: The name of a farm in the Hinckley area. Gibbons was delighted with the suggestion, and the work was published as Cold Comfort Farm in September 1932. The plot concerns the efforts of "a rational, bossy London heroine" to bring order and serenity to her rustic relations, the Starkadders, on their run-down Sussex farm. According to the Feminist Companion to Literature in English , Gibbons's parody "[demolishes] ...
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#17328848327885394-489: The novel has been compared to science fiction . Cold Comfort Farm has been adapted several times, including twice by BBC television. The book inspired Mellon family heiress Cordelia Scaife May to name her home "Cold Comfort", and to name her philanthropic foundation Colcom Foundation . BBC News included Cold Comfort Farm on its list of the 100 most influential novels . Stella Gibbons Stella Dorothea Gibbons (5 January 1902 – 19 December 1989)
5481-572: The often barbed humour, which reflected Gibbons's detestation of pomposity and pretence. Truss has described Gibbons as "the Jane Austen of the 20th century", a parallel which the novelist Malcolm Bradbury thought apt; Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm , with her "higher common sense", is "a Jane-ite heroine transformed into a clear-eyed modern woman". Bradbury also observed that many of Gibbons's novels end in Austen-like nuptials. Truss highlights
5568-718: The pregnancy of a local maid), sukebind (a weed whose flowering in the Spring symbolises the quickening of sexual urges in man and beast; the word is presumably formed by analogy to 'woodbine' ( honeysuckle ) and bindweed ) and clettering (an impractical method used by Adam for washing dishes, which involves scraping them with a dry twig or clettering stick ). Her portrayal of libidinous Meyerburg, "Mr Mybug", may have been aimed at Hampstead intellectuals (particularly Freudians and admirers of D. H. Lawrence ), but has also been seen as antisemitic in its description of his physiognomy and nameplay. Sheila Kaye-Smith , often said to be one of
5655-442: The real theme of the book was "liberals in trouble". All in all, Janeway wrote seven novels; one, 1945's Daisy Kenyon , was made into a film starring Joan Crawford . For a time, Janeway was a reviewer for The New York Times . In that capacity, she introduced writer Anthony Powell and served as a champion of controversial works such as Lolita . She was also a reviewer for Ms. . From 1965–1969, she served as president of
5742-603: The rest of Gibbons's career. Neville thought that after so singular a success at the start of her career, the rest was something of an anticlimax, despite her considerable industry and undoubted skills. The 1985 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature defines Gibbons solely in terms of Cold Comfort Farm ; it mentions none of her other works—while providing her bêtes noires Morgan and Mary Webb with full entries. To Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm became "That Book" or "You-Know-What", its title never mentioned. Despite her growing irritation and expressed distaste for it,
5829-483: The rights of these poor country folk NOT to fall into the hands of people like Flora". "For Gibbons, the suburb offered an ideal vantage point for exploring both urban modernity and countryside traditionalism, and for observing both literary modernism and the vestigial Romanticism of popular rural fiction." Faye Hammill: "Stella Gibbons: Ex-centricity and the Suburb" Although Boston suggested that Gibbons's rating in
5916-435: The rural writers parodied by Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm , arguably gets her own back with a tongue-in-cheek reference to Cold Comfort Farm within a subplot of A Valiant Woman (1939), set in a rapidly modernising village. The upper-middle-class teenager Lucia turns from writing charming rural poems to a great Urban Proletarian Novel: "… all about people who aren't married going to bed in a Manchester slum and talking about
6003-652: The school in 1917. Although a moderate performer in school subjects, Stella found outlets for her talents by writing stories for her fellow-pupils, becoming vice president of the Senior Dramatic Club, and featuring prominently in the school's Debating Society, of which she became the honorary secretary. While at school, Gibbons formed an ambition to be a writer, and on leaving in 1921 began a two-year Diploma in Journalism at University College , London (UCL). The course had been established for ex-servicemen returning from
6090-459: The second of whom—the eldest of four sons—was born in 1869 and was known by his fourth Christian name of "Telford". The Gibbons household was a turbulent one, with tensions arising from Charles Gibbons's frequent adulteries. Telford Gibbons trained as a doctor, and qualified as a physician and surgeon at the London Hospital in 1897. On 29 September 1900 he married Maude Williams, the daughter of
6177-487: The spring comes her hour is upon her again ... 'Tes the hand of Nature and we women cannot escape it." Cold Comfort Farm , chapter V. Judith Starkadder explains the mysterious properties of "sukebind". Gibbons's chosen title for her novel had been "Curse God Farm", before her friend Elizabeth Coxhead, who had connections in the Hinckley district of Leicestershire , suggested "Cold Comfort" as an alternative, using
6264-483: The stereotypical view of suburbia as unexciting, conventional and limited. Instead, says Hammill, "Gibbons's fictional suburbs are socially and architecturally diverse, and her characters—who range from experimental writers to shopkeepers—read and interpret suburban styles and values in varying and incompatible ways". Hammill adds that Gibbons's strong identification with her own suburban home, in which she lived for 53 years, may have influenced her preference to stay outside
6351-454: The sticks. As parody of the "loam and lovechild" genre, Cold Comfort Farm alludes specifically to a number of novels both in the past and contemporarily in vogue when Gibbons was writing. According to Faye Hammill's "Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars", the works of Sheila Kaye-Smith and Mary Webb are the chief influence: she considered that the farm
6438-428: The stock-in-trade of earthy regionalists such as Thomas Hardy , Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith and D. H. Lawrence". The literary scholar Faye Hammill describes the work as "an extremely sophisticated and intricate parody whose meaning is produced through its relationship with the literary culture of its day and with the work of such canonical authors as D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Emily Brontë ". In her history of
6525-499: Was Westwood (1946). The book incorporates a comic depiction of the novelist Charles Morgan , whose novel The Fountain Gibbons had reviewed before the war and found "offensive as well as wearisome". In Westwood , Morgan appears in the guise of the playwright "Gerard Challis", a pompous, humourless bore. Oliver considers this characterisation to be one of Gibbons's "most enjoyable and vicious" satirical portraits. In her introduction to
6612-571: Was a calm and stabilising influence. Until Stella reached the age of 13 she was educated at home by a succession of governesses, who never stayed long. The family's bookshelves provided reading material, and she developed a talent for storytelling with which she amused her young brothers. In 1915 Stella became a pupil at the North London Collegiate School , then situated in Camden Town . The school, founded in 1850 by Frances Buss ,
6699-502: Was among the first in England to offer girls an academic education, and by 1915 was widely recognised as a model girls' school. After the haphazard teaching methods of her governesses, Stella initially had difficulty in adjusting to the strict discipline of the school, and found many of its rules and practices oppressive. She shared this attitude with her contemporary Stevie Smith , the future Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry winner, who joined
6786-415: Was an English author, journalist, and poet. She established her reputation with her first novel , Cold Comfort Farm (1932) which has been reprinted many times. Although she was active as a writer for half a century, none of her later 22 novels or other literary works—which included a sequel to Cold Comfort Farm —achieved the same critical or popular success. Much of her work was long out of print before
6873-514: Was awarded her diploma. Gibbons's first job was with the British United Press (BUP) news agency, where she decoded overseas cables which she rewrote in presentable English. During slack periods she practised at writing articles, stories and poems. She made her first trips abroad, travelling to France in 1924 and Switzerland in 1925. Swiss Alpine scenery inspired several poems, some of which were later published. In 1924 she met Walter Beck,
6960-536: Was born that year. The advent of war in September 1939 did not diminish Gibbons's creative energy. In November she began a series of articles, "A Woman's Diary of the War", for St Martin's Review , the journal of the London church of St Martin-in-the-Fields . The series ran until November 1943, and includes many of Gibbons's private reflections on the conflict. In October 1941 she wrote: "[T]he war has done me good ... I get
7047-574: Was dismissed from the Standard in August 1930. This was ostensibly an economy measure although Gibbons, in later life, suspected other reasons, particularly the increasing distraction from work that arose from her relationship with Walter Beck. The engagement had ended painfully in 1928, primarily because Gibbons was looking for a fully committed relationship whereas he wanted something more open. Oliver believes Gibbons never entirely got over Beck, even after 1929 when she met Allan Webb, her future husband. She
7134-458: Was identical with what those pollarded elms felt." The speech of the Sussex characters is a parody of rural dialects (in particular Sussex and West Country accents – another parody of novelists who use phonics to portray various accents and dialects) and is sprinkled with fake but authentic-sounding local vocabulary such as mollocking (Seth's favourite activity, undefined but invariably resulting in
7221-463: Was known as "Calamity Janeway" for his pessimistic economic forecasts). Elizabeth described Eliot as "the most intelligent man I had ever met." The Janeways mingled with United States Supreme Court justices and many other public figures of the day (she recommended Erica Jong 's Fear of Flying to Justice William O. Douglas ). At the behest of labor organizer Walter Reuther , she aided General Motors workers with their mid-1940s strike against
7308-634: Was not unemployed for long; she quickly accepted a job offer as an editorial assistant at the women's magazine, The Lady . Here, according to The Observer writer Rachel Cooke , "she applied her versatility as a writer to every subject under the sun bar cookery, which was the province of a certain Mrs Peel." At the same time she began work on the novel that would become Cold Comfort Farm ; her colleague and friend Elizabeth Coxhead recorded that Gibbons "neglected her duties disgracefully" to work on this project. In her time with The Lady , Gibbons established
7395-467: Was now the family's principal breadwinner; her youngest brother Lewis was still at school, while the elder, Gerald, was intermittently employed as an actor. The three set up home in a cottage on the Vale of Health , a small settlement in the middle of Hampstead Heath, with literary connections to Keats (whom Gibbons revered), Leigh Hunt and D. H. Lawrence . Later that year, as a result of an error involving
7482-629: Was presented to the Keats-Shelley Memorial House museum in Rome. Gibbons maintained a wide circle of friends, who in her later years included Adams, the entertainer Barry Humphries and the novelist John Braine . From the mid-1970s she established a pattern of monthly literary tea parties in Oakshott Avenue at which, according to Neville, "she was known to expel guests if they were shrill, dramatic, or wrote tragic novels." As her own productivity dwindled and finally ceased altogether, she kept
7569-545: Was strongly in favor of abortion rights. Janeway continued to write and go on lecture tours. She learned to read Russian so she could read Turgenev and Chekhov in the original. Janeway was a judge for the National Book Awards in 1955 and for the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. She was an executive of International PEN . At its 1981 commencement ceremonies, her alma mater Barnard College awarded Janeway its highest honor,
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