Locking up the the woodshed
Have just been re-reading (along with a swathe of her non-Cold Comfort Farm novels), the biography of Stella Gibbons by her nephew Reggie Oliver, Out of the Woodshed*.
In the most recent episode in Jasper Fforde's saga of Thursday Next, she ends up making a brief visit to Cold Comfort Farm, where she observes that there is, indeed, something nasty lurking in the woodshed, vindicating Ada Doom.
Gibbons herself was pretty much living in the woodshed during her childhood and youth, the something nasty being her wildly dysfunctional family situation, created largely by her father, who appears to have been a wonderful general practitioner and a contempible human being outside his professional practice. What Gibbons wrote about Ada Doom seems entirely applicable to him:
Persons of Aunt Ada's temperament were not fond of a tidy life. Storms were what they liked; plenty of rows, and doors being slammed, and jaws sticking out, and faces white with fury, and faces brooding in corners, faces making unnecessary fuss at breakfast, and plenty of opportunities for gorgeous emotional wallowings, and partings for ever, and misunderstandings, and interferings, and spyings, and, above all, managing and intriguing. Oh, they did enjoy themselves!
Gibbons' version of 'Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through' was to go a long way in the other direction in favour of order, lack of draaaaaaama, dislike of scenes and arguments, detachment, irony, quiet humour. In spite of what her biographer perceives as the elements in her own character which perhaps approximated to Elfine or Judith Starkadder, or even Aunt Ada, she resisted those tendencies with immense self-discipline.
This desire for order and tidiness manifests throughout her fiction. One of the reasons why Conference at Cold Comfort Farm is nothing like as successful as its predecessor (though it has its moments) is that not only was that perhaps a river one could not step in twice, in C@CCF the Starkadders are seen as a benign anarchic force in an over-regulated world. Gibbons may have believed this intellectually, but this lacks the punch of her visceral preference for order, decorum and peacefulness.
She also rather loathed the assumption that Suffering Is Good For You, Especially If You Are An Artist. She believed in the 'Gentle Powers' ('Pity, Affection, Time, Beauty, Laughter') of the subtitle of one of her best non-CCF novels, Westwood.
There were contradictions in her character - she had an acute nose for misogyny (particularly in the allotrope of Reverence For Womanhood); she had been supporting herself and her somewhat layabout brothers (as well as doing the domestic household stuff) as a journalist before she became a novelist and then was earning more than her husband when they married, and clearly had to write, would not have given it up: yet in her novels she privileges marriage and, except in the case of Amy in My American (a successful writer of genre fiction, even if emotionally damaged) aspiring young women writers in her novels give it all up on finding the right man.
Oliver rather acutely suggests that she was a subtle and complex woman who admired the simple and the ordinary - and there is a subtext that her desire to present herself as an 'ordinary woman' grew out of a family background which was particularly rich in special snowflakes of a rather malign cast.
This may be yet another instance of a writer whose characters are very much not them.
Gibbons' novels counteract a lot of generalisations about social attitudes in works of the interwar era: she was philo-Semitic (even if she does fall into some degree of group stereotyping around this) and doesn't have the condescending class attitudes either - she does realistic and uncaricatured lower-class characters who often bear much of the story, and also depicts successful cross-class marriage. Her political views tended to the conservative, but her novels feature several sympathetic Communist, or fellow-travelling, characters.
Word on the street is that Virago are republishing Nightingale Wood, perhaps the most charming of her non-CCF novels, sometime in the forthcoming year. I would love to see a revival of interest in these other novels, which were popular in their day and were being reissued in those reprint editions for libraries well into the 1970s.
*Really rather readably written and analytical for a family-member production, but o dear, what was the copy-editor about? Who is this Bramwell Bronte of whom you speak (at several points in the text)?