On there not being something nasty where one would expect it
I've recently been ingesting Stella Gibbons' Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm and other stories (1940). Which is definitely one for the Gibbons completists, and am I glad that a copy turned up at under £20, because previously the only copies I could see via bookfinder.com were priced well into 3 figures. Even the 1972 library reprint edition.
It's all rather slight, and I think I have remarked before, Gibbons doesn't strike me as a natural short story writer, her length is the novel.
Also, nearly all the stories, except the title one, which does what it says on the tin, are about nice young women, initially exciting but ultimately annoying &/or shallow bohos, and the pleasures of cosy undramatic affection and domesticity.
Which, okay, Gibbons is all about the anti-romantic and the disadvantages of the hurlyburly of the chaise longue or the hollow under the sukebind hedge, but these represent a very narrow portion of her range, especially as regards class.
One story that particularly made me go 'huh?' was the one in which a former frequenter of boho circles, now cosily married and living in the country, is visited by former dear friends. And her lovely, understanding, conventional husband is:
A doctor.
If there was anyone I would not expect to use a doctor in this extraordinarily conventional trope of desirable marriage to professional man of caring nature, it would be Gibbons, whose father, though apparently a wonderful GP, was a toxic human being in domestic life and probably the model for pretty much all the Starkadders, especially the unreformed Aunt Ada Doom.
I then remembered that one of the episodes in Miss Linsey and Pa in which a young woman writer is rescued from an oppressive menage with a possessive older woman by the local doctor.
And seem to recollect that the male lead in My American becomes a doctor? (can't lay my hands on my copy at the moment) after his involvement with gangsters, at least partly in reparation?
But I wouldn't have expected Gibbons to place doctors as both figures of quiet romance and the signifier of undramatic yet agreeable married life.
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