Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons

by Reggie Oliver

Born into an Irish family in Hampstead where she lived for most of her life, Stella Gibbons is probably best remembered for her book Cold Comfort Farm. Written by her nephew, this biography of the novelist and poet draws on her personal papers including two unpublished novels.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Reggie Oliver is a stage actor and playwright. His biography of Stella Gibbons was praised as “a triumph” by Hilary Spurling in the Daily Telegraph, his play Winner Takes All, was described as “the funniest evening in London”, by Michael Billington in The Guardian, and his adaptation of Hennequin and Delacour’s Once Bitten opened at the Orange Tree Theatre in London in December 2010.

He is the author of four highly-praised volumes of short fiction: The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini (Haunted River 2003), The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (Haunted River 2005), Masques of Satan (Ash Tree 2007), and Madder Mysteries (Ex Occidente 2009). His stories have appeared in over 25 anthologies and, for the third year running, one of his stories appears in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, the most widely read and popular of contemporary horror anthologies.

Reviews

[Gill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is described as follows:-

"Stella Gibbons is remembered for one book, the wildly funny Cold Comfort Farm, and otherwise largely forgotten. This biography by her playwright nephew gives a comprehensive and forgiving portrait of a rather ordinary life, in which writing took second place to her religious beliefs and the performance as good wife and mother that went with them.
Stella Gibbons grew up with a domineering father and spent a brief period running with a fast bohemian set before settling into marriage with an unsuccessful singer who had snobbish relatives. A job on The Lady that involved reviewing contemporary fiction, and a strong sense of the ridiculous, produced her sublime parody of rural melodrama; Oliver is good on precisely what she had been reading and was parodying. He tries his hardest to make her 20 other novels sound interesting and appealing; this is at the very least a competent guide to the rest of her career. Part of the trouble was, simply, that she found massive public and critical acclaim with her first book and rather than live up to it, affected to play a different game. Oliver does his best to make this seem attractive."

I have to declare an interest in that I'm a huge fan of Gibbons writing and having written 25 other novels, 3 volumes of short stories, 3 volumes of poetry, 1 children’s book besides all her journalism she is so much more than the author of Cold Comfort Farm. She would have preferred to have been remembered as a poet and in fact her poetry was well reviewed and received when published although would be regarded as somewhat dated and sentimental now.

I've read most of her books and although some are better than others, many are certainly worthy of being read if only for their huge range of female characters, her exploration of class and in particular how the wealthy can be so careless with regards to the use of and feelings of the lower classes, exploration of relationships, championing of the underdog and inclusion of issues of the time at which she was writing. Her writing also displays her acerbic wit which is directed at the pretentiousness and grandiosity associated with the literary and cultural trendsetters and elite. I would certainly recommend Westwood, Bassett, Nightingale Wood and Here Be Dragons.

I was re-reading these books and Cold Comfort Farm along with this biography and was forcibly struck by the profound effect which her upbringing within an unhappy, turbulent and fearful household along with her father's open dislike of her looks, had on her. Many of her female protagonists are described as plain or unattractive to men, her books can feature melodramtic scenes, unhappy marriages and characters (both male and female) who are bullies and inspire fear or quiet acquiescence within the household. All of these were common features of her immediate and wider family and as well as being able to base characters and situations on what she'd experienced, perhaps writing was also a carthartic process for her.

As Reggie Oliver is Gibbons nephew he had access to family members, stories and papers which give a useful insight to her family. I found this portrayal of the wider family as fascinating and even by today's standards the Gibbons family would be considered completely bonkers or dysfunctional! The book was worth being read just for this. He also admits that he is not a literary critic but does his best to be objective about the different books as well as providing background on how and why they came to be written.

There are very few academic papers, articles or books about Gibbons and her writing which makes this book a very valuable resource.

[Fraser Burnett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enlivened by anecdotes regarding Uncle Cyprian, and his being introduced to a kitchen. And Ina Dornan in her dotage.

Also interesting for the Oliver reader, is the introduction of certain phrases that would later appear in his fiction.

Will I ever read Gibbons? Her poetry, yes. Her fiction, I very much doubt.

[Felicity · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oliver's engaging portrait of Stella Gibbons provided an engaging diversion from what I'm supposed to be reading. It is neither an academic biography nor peer-reviewed literary criticism, providing no footnotes, which I regret, a select bibliography and list of other sources, and no critical jargon, 'for this relief much thanks!' Much of Oliver's anecdotal evidence derives from the recollections of his mother, the sister-in-law of Gibbons, but the author's personal connection with his subject does not reduce to an expression of nepotal piety. Interestingly, Oliver tends to underrate Gibbons's more obviously autobiographical novels, most notably Enbury Heath, a particular favourite of mine, seemingly on the grounds of the lack of imaginative transformation of experience. Oliver is of course a master of fantasy fiction, while I am merely an addict of idylls that implode in literature as in life. It matters little to me whether this is how it was in the novelist's private life. Nor does it matter to me whether a particular character in Westwood is based on Charles Morgan, only one of whose once-celebrated novels I have ever read and will never reread. According to Oliver, admiration of contemporary cult figures such as Morgan 'established your spiritual and intellectual credentials' (190). Parodies and pastiches, however, risk redundancy when the travestied authors have long since fallen out of favour. Gibbons's ambivalence to the novel that established her reputation and overshadowed her subsequent writings, effectively reducing her to a one-hit wonder, leads me to wonder whether she would have regretted the potential demise of Cold Comfort Farm now that Mary Webb's rustic romances, whose alleged lyrical and spiritual credentials eluded me on first and final reading, have returned to earth as landfill. Oliver's witty summaries of Gibbons's novels, especially writerly novels-within-novels, are splendidly succinct: 'Besides the affliction of inspissated prose, there is rain, a mad horse and too much washing up' (142). But his disapproval of Gibbons's alleged tendency to moralise too obtrusively, 'a bad habit' she shared with George Eliot, (173) seems to me unfair to both authors. When criticising Gibbons for her carelessness over minor offences of spelling, punctuation and infelicitous expression, all of which 'should have been corrected by diligent editors and proofreaders', (133) Oliver would have benefited from similar supervision of his own text. The persistent misspelling of Branwell Brontë's name, and the sporadic typos, evidently escaped his detection as did the needless repetition of anecdotes and incidents. I am, however, grateful to Oliver for drawing attention to Gibbons's prescient objection to what is now known as recovered memory syndrome, and to her short stories and poetry, most notably 'Coverings', which had previously and inexplicably escaped my detection. My enthusiasm for Gibbons has still not reached saturation point.

[Beth Bonini · Rating 4 out of 5]

In short, like all interesting people she was a mass of contradictions.

To many people who knew her in the last years of her life the overwhelming impression she gave was one of serenity and gentleness, but her serenity has hard won and her gentleness was tempered in private by a pleasing acerbity. She never lost the astringent quality which informs and inspires 'that book'.

That book was Cold Comfort Farm: a 20th century British classic, described by Reggie Oliver as a book which "will be read and enjoyed for as long as the English language and the English sense of humour last.". Reggie Oliver is Stella Gibbons' nephew, and when he wrote this biography (1998), nearly all of Gibbons' 32 books were out of print - the exception being Cold Comfort Farm. I believe that Oliver worried that his aunt would be remembered as a sort of literary "one hit wonder", but the case is quite different as I am writing in 2022. In 2011, Vintage Classics brought 14 of her novels back into print - and since then, there have been more - including her two last books, which weren't published in her lifetime. When I visited the Waterstones at Gower Street this week there were no less than 7 of her books available on the shelf. (I bought Nightingale Wood.) This October, the Daunt Books in Belsize Park (London) devoted an entire window to her highly autobiographical novel Enbury Heath - a story set in the Vale of Health and chronicling the year that a sister and her two brothers set up house together following their parents' deaths. It was that book, purchased chiefly because I was attracted to the Hampstead setting, which set me down the path of my Stella Gibbons reading binge.

Although she ended up writing two sequels to her great bestseller, in many respects Cold Comfort Farm is quite different from her other books. The literary qualities which unite all of her books, though, are the vivid characterisation and strong sense of the absurd. Also, there is a consistently strong sense of place - and many of the books are set in the Hampstead/Highgate area of north London where she lived for all of her long life. Much of my fascination with her writing has to do with that setting. I fell in love with Hampstead when I was 21 and have lived in this part of north London for the past 4 years. It's an ongoing pleasure to compare the 21st Hampstead I know with the 1930s-50s version that Gibbons so ably describes.

No writer has ever evoked this part of London better or more comprehensively than Stella in some of her finest novels, ranging from Enbury Heath in 1935 to her last published novel, The Woods in Winter, of 1970. She covered its wide social spectrum, its grand houses and mean streets, and she captured the melancholy charm of the Heath where she loved to walk.

Being related to one's subject is a mixed blessing, I think. On one hand, Reggie Oliver had a first-hand knowledge of his aunt and can give the sort of specific details which bring a person to life. For instance, late in life she started smoking Gauloise cigarettes again after many years of being a nonsmoker. He also recalls her describing herself as "not shy, but unsociable", although he goes into some detail about the 'at home' parties she gave for many years on the first Saturday of the month. A detail which I particularly relished was his mention that she was particularly prone to odd cleaners, and then he goes on to describe several of them, including a Buddhist, pulse-eating, would be novelist male cleaner. As I have read several of her books which contained decidedly 'odd cleaners', it made me wonder which inclination came first.

The downside to Reggie Oliver's relationship with his aunt is that he really only knew her as an old woman. Even when late middle-aged, she seemed to have adopted some of the habits and mental tendencies of an older person. I felt like the younger Stella was not so real to him, and thus to me as the reader of this biography. Also, I think there is a naturally protective constraint when delving into the life of a fellow member. The most glaringly obvious example of this, for me, has to do with Stella's relationship with her husband. Although Oliver touches on the fact that Alan had lots of affairs and flirtations - he was an actor from about 22 until his early 40s, and later ran a secondhand bookshop - there is little mention (and no analysis, really) of how this affected Stella. She is described throughout as a devoted and loving wife.

Although I am primarily interested in Stella Gibbons as a novelist, Reggie Oliver also goes into some detail about her work as a journalist and even more so as a poet. Several of Stella's altar egos in the novels write poetry - or read lots of it - and she also gave her characters her own preferences in poets (Keats and Shelley, for example). I found it difficult to judge her poetry from the excerpts provided, but it didn't appeal to me very much and I found myself skimming over it.

Another feature of the biography is that it gives summaries of many of her novels and also includes the biographer's opinion of each novel's strong points and literary merits. Many Gibbons enthusiasts (like me) will enjoy his insights into which bits of the novels borrowed from life. Some of his observations are really incisive, but he can be quite unnecessarily opinionated. An observation which did amuse me was his description of The Swiss Summer, which has been reissued by the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint of Dean Street Press. A friend of mine has recently ranked it in the 'top ten' novels of the year for 2021. Oliver describes it thus:

One might recommend it to a convalescent, much as doctors used to recommend milk puddings and other bland but nourishing forms of sustenance.

I don't think this is a great biography, by any means, but I would certainly recommend it to anyone especially interested in its subject or in 20th century British female writers. I don't think there has been any other biography of her life, although Rachel Cooke wrote an excellent article about her for The Guardian on Sunday 7 August 2011. On the other hand, this study of her life did confirm how much of Stella Gibbons you can find within the pages of her own novels.

[Anne Wellman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and well researched biography of the inimitable Stella Gibbons, still so funny today. Fascinating to discover the subjects of the parody in Cold Comfort Farm - Mary Webb and even D.H. Lawrence - and how prescient Stella was in her futuristic setting. Thoroughly enjoyed reading this and impelled to read more of her subsequent novels.

[A J HOOPER · Rating 3 out of 5]

A biography that relies more on excerpts from Stella Gibbons novels than any psychological insight. So I didn't enjoy it .

[Deena · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I receive with polite reserve the pronouncements of Prime ministers about imaginative literature. As a tule, either their taste has been distorted by terrible experiences in public schools, and resembles a bicycle after it has been run over by a motor lorry, or they have been too busy conscientiously misguiding the destiny of fifty million human beings properly to nourish their taste..."

"Of course most writers have this secret resentment against the world for neglecting their work; but most writers have the sense to realise that the world sometimes has more important things to do than worry about their novels."

"She once said to me that, though she did not mind that these designers were chosen from the ranks of struggling young artists, she did wish that the reason for their having to struggle was not always so painfully apparent."

"I'm not shy, I'm just unsociable."

(The book goes back in moments, so I needed to get my quotations down!)


I'm very glad that I was able to read this (a copy had to be sent from Boston to my little town in south-central Pennsylvania via inter-library loan).

I liked learning about Stella's life. I'm not sure, however, that I would have liked her if I'd known her. It may have been stylistic (see below), but Mr. Oliver consistently made it seem like Ms. Gibbons was opinionated, judgmental, and self-righteous. It was interesting to read about the events and people that influenced Ms. Gibbons or found their way into her stories.

I had two major problems with this book. The first is that I don't like poetry very much, and Ms. Gibbons was in fact a prolific poet. Mr. Oliver uses gobs of the peotry all through the book. I skimmed it. While I can see using some, since it was important to Ms. Gibbons and it is, after all, her biography, I think there was an awful lot of it included gratuitously. Which leads me to the next, bigger problem: Mr. Oliver's methodology.

First let me say that before I read this book, I saw a review of it somewhere on the internet that argued that Mr. Oliver was not sufficiently objective. Through most of the book, I disagreed with that. And I think over-all, I still do. That's not the problem. Where Ms. Gibbons was wrong or her writing was of uneven quality, Mr. Oliver says so. Objectivity isn't his problem. By the end of the book, he shows a tendency to need to show off how close his relationship with his aunt was, and the last third of the book is filled with things she said or wrote to him that show her in a snarky and rather unpleasant light (at least to this reader). I'm as big a fan of Dorothy Parker-style snark as the next reader, but Ms. Gibbons comments came across - through Mr. Oliver's telling - as judgmental and self-righteous.

Additionally, a huge portion of the book is literary criticism, and it is here that I have the biggest problem. I loathe literary criticism. Mr. Oliver showily refers to a long list of materials - magazines, poems, poets, novels, novelists, reviewers, publishers, organizations, etc., most of which average readers have never heard of and don't care about. But if a reader doesn't know what/who those things are, the criticisms he spouts make no sense. Instead reading long sections of text is boring, contributes nothing to the reader's understanding of Ms. Gibbons, and gives the impression that Mr. Oliver is an arrogant show-off who doesn't know when to edit his research. Sometimes he provides very long, distracting explanations/descriptions of who the people he's talking about are, and other times he tells nothing at all, just tosses names around like confetti (read as: I know who this is, and if you don't, you're just ignorant). Breaks up the focus of the book, and is distinctly annoying to wade through.

It was interesting to read what Ms. Gibbons thought about her work (more so than what she thought about people around her, in fact, as judgmental as she was). But I'm not sure I liked, or agreed with, her views. I wouldn't say she was wrong - not my place to tell someone else how to feel!! But I do think that rigidly adhering to attitudes that make your life harder is not likely to elicit sympathy from this reader!

Mr. Oliver did not convince me that Ms. Gibbons wasn't a one-trick pony. In fact he may have convinced me that she was. I don't care. That one trick, Cold Comfort Farm, is - to me - a treasure of a contribution to readers in any age. I will continue to reread and love it. I enjoyed reading Nightingale Wood (which I read while I was reading this biography), and as soon as I'm sure I've forgotten Mr. Oliver's lofty critiques I will probably continue to sample Ms. Gibbons' work. I am still glad I read this book, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it.