In St Alberics, Hertfordshire, stands a newly built family home: Sunglades. Its seven rooms house Kenneth and Constance Fielding, middle-aged bachelor and spinster, along with Kenneth's old flame, an industrious Balkan exile, a young economist and the Fieldings' raffish father. Together they attempt to create a rural idyll precariously close to the remains of blitzed London.
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Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, 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.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hyacinth Bucket's aunt during World War II,
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This review is from: The bachelor, (Hardcover)
Stella Gibbons is most famous for Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition), which was made into a movie (Cold Comfort Farm). This is a tale with a slightly lower-key version of her very dry, quirky humor. Set in England during World War II, it is reminiscent of Jane Austen in not really being about the momentous events going on at the time, but is rather a comedy of manners about how people cope with life - that it happens to be during this particular time merely sets some of the details.
The tale begins with the invasion of Bairama, a fictitious mountainous Eastern European country comprising a pastiche of all the motifs familiar to that region - proud, ferocious mountaineers who seem to be a unique amalgam of Muslim and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Prior to the invasion, Varhouti Annamatti has gone to England as a refugee and goes to work at rural house occupied by a middle-aged brother and sister. The book sends up a number of the intellectual trends of the time. (And this time as well.) The sister's ardent internationalism (she feels that it is her duty to ignore the unfortunate unpleasantness, i.e. WWII), supplies a great deal of the humor, especially her attempt to force her unfortunate associates into putting on the play "Little Frimdl and the Peace Reindeer". Her cousin, meanwhile, prides himself on being a socialist with an aristocratic upbringing. The sister, apparently a xenophilic aunt of Hyacinth Bucket of "Keeping up Appearances", is so self-centered as to be unable to understand that she is selfish, and tyrannizes her brother and a variety of relations who move through the house during the story. Except Varhouti. The resulting clash turns their lives upside down. This may not be for everyone - one does have to be able to appreciate Gibbons' decidedly off-beat amd irreverant humor, but I found it extremely funny.
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