Westwood
Authors: Stella Gibbons
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Contemporary Fiction, #Literary
Set in wartime London,
Westwood
tells the story of Margaret Steggles, a plain bookish girl whose mother has told her that she is ‘not the type that attracts men’. Her schoolfriend Hilda has a sunny temperament and keeps her service boys ‘ever so cheery’. When Margaret finds a ration book on Hampstead Heath the pompous writer Gerard Challis enters both their lives. Margaret slavishly adores Challis and his artistic circle; Challis idolises Hilda for her hair and her eyes and Hilda finds Gerard’s romantic overtures a bit of a bind. This is a delightfully comic and wistful tale of love and longing.
Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She worked for various newspapers including the
Evening Standard
. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short-stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems
The Mountain Beast
(1930) and her first novel
Cold Comfort Farm
(1932) won the Femina Vie Heuruse Prize for 1933. Amongst her works are
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm
(1940),
Westwood
(1946),
Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
(1959) and
Starlight
(1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.
Cold Comfort Farm
Bassett
Enbury Heath
Nightingale Wood
My American
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm
The Rich House
Ticky
The Bachelor
The Matchmaker
Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
Here Be Dragons
White Sand and Grey Sand
The Charmers
Starlight
To
Peggy Butcher
Philippians iv. 8
STELLA GIBBONS
or The Gentle Powers
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Lynne Truss
This is what everyone knows about Stella Gibbons: she wrote only one book, but it was a very, very good one.
Cold Comfort Farm
, published in 1932 when its obscure female author was thirty years old, was a brilliant, perfect comic novel, satirising the ‘loam and love-child’ genre of English fiction. It was a huge success on publication and is rightly regarded as a classic eighty years later. But what about its author? What did Stella Gibbons go on to do? Did she ever write anything else? Did she perhaps renounce the literary life and devote herself to bee-keeping? Was ‘Stella Gibbons’ perhaps not even a real person in the first place? After all, how can someone write a huge debut book like
Cold Comfort Farm
and then not become a literary celebrity?
In fact, Stella Gibbons went on to write more than twenty more novels, one of which was the 1946 novel
Westwood
you are currently holding in your hand. Like all the others, it has been overshadowed by the success of
Cold Comfort Farm
(rather than helped by it) which just goes to show the rotten unfairness of things sometimes. I first read
Westwood
about ten years ago, when I was in the habit of suggesting nifty ideas to BBC radio, and had come up with an intriguing literary hypothesis on which I proposed to build an ambitious season of programmes and adaptations. Was it true, I wondered, that funny women writers are generally allowed only one success in their careers? Wouldn’t it be interesting to examine this rather clever insight in relation to (say) Anita Loos, Stella Gibbons and Betty MacDonald – and then dramatise one (each) of their less well-known books or novels? A quick look through the reference materials told me that
Stella Gibbons had published over two dozen books between 1930 and her death in 1989, including a couple of collections of poetry. Just as I had suspected, none of these books, apart from
Cold Comfort Farm
, was even in print.
So I thought I should probably read some of these neglected books of hers – for one thing, I needed to check they weren’t rubbish. I picked up
Westwood
under guidance from my frighteningly widely-read friend Deirdre, and it occurs to me as I write this that I still haven’t properly thanked her for the recommendation, because
Westwood
is a book I loved deeply on first reading and have loved deeply ever since. It is a wise and truthful novel which makes me laugh, and also makes me weep. If
Cold Comfort Farm
is Stella Gibbons’s
Pride and Prejudice
, then
Westwood
is her
Persuasion
. Sadly, the BBC rejected my idea about the female one-hit-wonders. However, they did let me rescue one element from the wreckage. They allowed me to dramatise
Westwood
as a two-part ‘Classic Serial’, and it remains one of the most pleasurable things I’ve done.
Westwood
makes an interesting companion to
Cold Comfort Farm
, being concerned just as much with the eternal struggle between romantic illusion and common sense; however, it expresses that struggle much more sympathetically. Set in wartime north London (specifically the Hampstead Heath and Highgate beloved of its author), it concerns the 23-year-old Margaret Steggles, an emotionally earnest, plain, loveless young English teacher who reveres, above all things, poetry, art and drama. ‘I’ve got such frighteningly strong feelings,’ she tells her old school friend Hilda in the first chapter. ‘I think you imagine a lot of it,’ is the matter-of-fact reply. Through the bathetic agency of a dropped ration book recovered on Hampstead Heath, Margaret gains entry into an exciting world of north London intellectuals – the fashionable painter Alexander Niland, his spoiled wife Hebe, and above all, his eminent father-in-law Gerard Challis, a deeply unfrivolous playwright of high renown. Margaret is overwhelmed by this opportunity to share a more intellectually elevated way of life – ignoring the obvious fact that these people are ghastly. Not only do they quite openly mock her sincerity (and high-handedly foist their small children onto her), but they disappointingly sit about discussing mundane things such as the scarcity of matches, just like anyone else. How confusing this all is for an intelligent girl like Margaret. She wants to worship Gerard Challis; she can quote his preposterous plays; she dreams of his beautiful blue eyes. And yet she can’t help it: she still instinctively quibbles with every lordly generalisation he deigns to confer on her.
Margaret’s nervousness was as keen as her delight as they walked together across the faded carpet to the door. As [Challis] opened it, he turned to her once more with his grave searching look, and she experienced a delicious tremor …
‘There is a helpless quality, don’t you agree, about a room that is prepared for a party,’ he observed. ‘The silence and flowers are like victims, awaiting the noise of conversation and the cigarette smoke and dissonant jar of conflicting personalities that shall presently destroy them.’
Margaret had been thinking that the hall looked perfectly lovely and wishing with all her heart that she was going to the party too, but she hastily readjusted her point of view, and answered solemnly, ‘Yes, I know just what you mean.’
Challis is a terrific character. Pompous, vain, self-satisfied, humourless, he speaks as if from a mountaintop, and refuses to compromise with real life, even in a time of war. By way of everyday conversation, his high-minded characters say things like, ‘Suffering is the anvil upon which the crystal sword of integrity is hammered’ – which fits in with the way they quite often step outside
and kill themselves on the flimsiest pretext as well. In his play
Kattë
(written and premiered in the course of the novel), the Viennese heroine’s lover shoots himself offstage; then her father shoots her mother for having borne him such a daughter; he then jumps into the Danube. And in the end, of course, Kattë shoots herself for bringing so much misery on everyone else by her sheer cursed attractiveness.
‘He knew that his plays were good; each one better than its predecessor.
Mountain Air
, the one about six women botanists and a male guide isolated in a snowstorm in a hut on the Andes, had been surer in its approach and handling than his first one,
The Hidden Well
, which concerned the seven men and one female nurse on the tsetse-fly research station … while
Kattë
dealt with an Austrian woman who was bandied about by the officers of a crack regiment in Vienna, and was, he felt convinced, his masterpiece.
He was for ever thinking up new permutations and combinations.’
Challis was rather transparently modelled on the writer Charles Morgan (1894-1958), whose play
The Flashing Stream
had been a big hit before the war. Morgan had annoyed Stella Gibbons in two significant ways: first, by arguing that a sense of humour was overrated in writers (the great Shakespeare had managed without one, he claimed); and second, for writing exasperatingly dreadful female characters along the lines of Kattë. In
Westwood
(
Chapter 20
), Challis’s cut-glass wife Seraphina is devastatingly frank about his lack of realism in this important area:
‘I don’t mean to butt in or be rude, and I do know everyone
says
you’re such a
marvellous
psychologist and I’m not highbrow or anything, but honestly you
don’t
know much about women. The women in your plays are such
hags
, darling; absolute witches and hags, if you don’t mind my saying so. I don’t know
any
women like them and I’ve known
hordes
of women.’