17. Stella Gibbons — Nightingale Wood

AMY: So it’s January, 2021, and as we discussed in last week’s episode, Kim, it feels like the time of year for fresh starts, right?

KIM: Yeah, and we really need one after last year, for sure.

AMY: Of course. Yes. Please, god. So the literary heroine we’ll be discussing in today’s episode is getting a new start in life, but “fresh start” might not be the best way to put it.

KIM: No. I mean, if there’s such a thing as a “stale start,” then I think that’s what this character is getting, sadly. At least in the beginning anyway.

AMY: Yeah, in the case of Stella Gibbons’ Nightingale Wood, a somber change in circumstances for protagonist Viola Withers sets the stage for a charmingly unorthodox 1930s-era Cinderella Story.

KIM: So welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off lost classics by some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes, and we’ll be your fairy godmothers this week, discussing Stella Gibbons’ novel Nightingale Wood.

KIM: Yes, and Stella Gibbons is an author who is not particularly well known, but if you do know her, it probably means you’ve read her best-selling novel, Cold Comfort Farm, and it was adapted into a film starring Kate Beckinsale in 1995.

AMY: It’s basically about “something nasty in the woodshed,” and if you want to know what I mean by that, you have to go read the book.

KIM: Don’t scare everyone, Amy. There’s a lot more to it than that. It’s been described as a burlesque satire of the rural novel, which is a great description of it. It's completely hilarious, but I also do find myself sometimes wondering about that incident in that woodshed. It’s very mysterious. And because Cold Comfort Farm is Stella Gibbon’s most well-known work, we highly recommend you go read that one if you’re new to this author. 

AMY: Yes, you’re going to love that book. But it’s also precisely because Gibbons is really only known for Cold Comfort Farm that we wanted to use today’s episode to talk about another one of her deserving titles, we think: Nightingale Wood. 

KIM: Yes, and we can’t say anything nasty happens in the woodshed in this book, but there’s plenty of wry comedy, a realistic take on romance, and some sexcapades and high drama, too! So let’s raid the stacks, and get started!

[Intro music]

AMY: So, Kim, I want to start by saying there’s a biography about Stella Gibbons by her nephew, Reggie Oliver, called Out of the Woodshed. Duh-da-DUM!

KIM: [laughing]. Wow, that is great! That is too much! Her legacy is never going to be able to live down what happened in the woodshed.

AMY: No. And maybe something bad really did happen, because she apparently had a pretty unhappy childhood in a household of “violent egomaniacs.” She was born in 1902, the daughter of a London doctor, and she described him as “a bad man, but a good doctor.” He was apparently an alcoholic, a womanizer and physically violent and emotionally abusive.

KIM: Wow. And then we see alcoholism come into play in Nightingale Wood, so it’s sad to think she was likely drawing on her tangible experiences there.

AMY: Yeah, it was certainly not an idyllic childhood for her, and it’s easy to see where a lot of her cynicism as a writer comes into play as a result of that. But on the flip side of that, as the oldest of three children, a heavy responsibility fell on her shoulders and she said that she was inspired as a child to invent many fairy tales that she told to her two younger brothers, these happy-ending stories to help them forget their miserable circumstances. Actually, in her early twenties, both her parents died within quick succession of one another and she was basically the sole breadwinner looking after those two younger brothers.

KIM: Right. And around this time she was a journalist. She was writing articles about pretty much everything under the sun. And then when her first novel — Cold Comfort Farm, as we mentioned —  was published in 1930, it was to instant success. 

AMY: And like we said, it was a spoof on this genre of rural novels that were written by women in the 1920s. (And these were books that Gibbons hated. She thought that they were so stupid.) So she was poking fun at that, and this novel was so loved by critics that one even suggested “Stella Gibbons” was probably a pen name used by the male writer Evelyn Waugh. Nobody could believe a first-time author (and a woman) could have written such a sophisticated parody. Having become an overnight celebrity, Gibbons was assured by her agent that she’d be able to make a comfortable living writing novels for the rest of her life. (Oh my god, how much would we love to hear that?) So she quit her job at the women’s magazine she was working for, and did just that. 

KIM: Well, Cold Comfort Farm won the Prix Etranger, a French literary prize, and Virginia Woolf was actually irked by this, because Gibbons had beat out two of her good friends in the category. Woolf thought one of them ought to have won instead. And some have suggested that Gibbons was given the cold shoulder by the literati in her lifetime because she always sort of distanced herself from those circles and even mocked the literary establishment. But Gibbons does in fact reference Woolf in Nightingale Wood and not in a bad way, so maybe that’s all been a bit overblown?

AMY: I read that she actually grew to resent her association with Cold Comfort Farm because she felt like people were just ignoring the rest of her 20-some subsequent literary works and she didn’t like that.  She said the book was like, quote, "some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but is often an embarrassment and a bore." 

KIM: [laughing] I love that description.

AMY: She was widely regarded as a “one-hit wonder” of the literary world, and she hated that, because she wrote prolifically all her life, really almost until the end of her life in 1989.

KIM: As for her personal life, after a broken engagement with the first love of her life (a German man named Walter Beck), she ended up marrying an aspiring actor and opera singer named Allan Webb, and he was described in one article as a man of “frail constitution.” Her only child, a daughter named Laura, was born the same year Nightingale Wood was published.

AMY: And then, a few other fun facts about Gibbons: Despite her scathing wit and caustic sense of humor, which is what she’s really known for, she considered herself to be much more of a serious poet than a writer of comedy. She loved Keats, in particular, and Nightingale Wood could really be seen as a subtle nod to him. Gibbons also once claimed that her idea of hell was having to go shopping for fishing rods in Harrods Department Store with Ernest Hemingway. Kim, I think I would have really gotten along with this chick. She kind of just says it, consequences be damned. I like that about her.

KIM: Definitely. And if you do need another reason to love her, she was a longtime admirer of Jane Austen. In 1960, she wrote a science fiction story for Punch magazine called, Jane In Space, which was written in the style of Jane Austen. Wow.

AMY: Yeah, I saw that, and I immediately went online and tried to find a copy of it, with no success. So I would love to read it. If anybody listening is able to find that on the “interwebs,” would you please let us know and send us the link? It’s got to be out there somewhere.

KIM: Please. Yes, somewhere. Another one of her novels, Enbury Heath, is a thinly fictionalized account of her harrowing family life growing up, and that could be worth checking out too.

AMY: Yeah, it could be sad, though, given what we know about her youth. Although apparently she didn’t really wallow in her troubled childhood or have any sort of self-pitying attitude about it. She famously wrote that, “Happiness can never hope to command so much interest as distress,” which actually seems like a good segue that could bring us into our discussion of Nightingale Wood right now.

KIM: So let’s get right into it. The protagonist of Nightingale Wood, Viola Withers, seems to be at a hopeless crossroads to kick off the novel. Having wed very young to a man she wasn’t even in love with, she ends up forced by necessity to go live with his in-laws after his sudden death. And these in-laws, the Withers, are rich, but really joyless, people. The father-in-law is money-obsessed and a spendthrift, and the mother-in-law is judgmental and insipid. And then there are two sisters, Tina and Madge, whom you could maybe consider the “ugly spinster stepsisters” of the novel… at least in the beginning anyway. 

AMY: Right, and all of them judge Viola because she comes from a different class. She was a shop girl before she married into the family and they all look down their noses at her. Gibbons writes, “She wore clothes that were subtly incorrect, played no expensive games, and was not quite a lady.” So she’s basically financially dependent on this family, the Withers, and she kind of feels doomed to a life of never-ending dreariness and loneliness living at the Eagles, which is the name of their dark and stuffy old mansion. 

KIM: And that’s not to say, though, that she’s one of those perfect, fairy tale heroines at all. Gibbons makes it really clear she has very little depth even though her heart is in the right place. In one telling quote from the book, she describes Viola by writing: “She never felt cross with anyone for long; her deplorably weak nature hardly seemed capable of sustaining a healthy indignation.” 

AMY: So yeah, she’s kind of flavorless in some ways, and you find yourself (and I think it’s actually intentional on Gibbons’ part) rooting much more fervently for some of the other women in this story. But we’ll get to that momentarily. For now, suffice to say that the one bit of excitement in Viola’s life comes in the form of the dashing Victor Spring, the Bentley-driving equivalent of “Mr. Big,” basically, whose ego matches the size of his house and bank account. So, like the Shakespearean character she’s named after, Viola finds herself pining over this princely figure even though he is already engaged to one Phyllis Barlow. (Think of the Baroness Schraeder from The Sound of Music, basically. She’s a beautiful, badass bitch, and she loves that she landed one of England’s most eligible bachelors, but she sees some flaws in Victor.

KIM: And don’t we all! He is an arrogant jerk! 

AMY: He’s awful.

KIM: Yeah. Even Viola feels a strange distaste for him the first moment they meet, whereas he sees her as an easy sexual conquest. He can’t even remember her name correctly for a while. Gibbons writes: “He had stupid, old-fashioned, ultra-masculine views on women. He never lost the feeling (though of course he had to suppress it in front of Phyllis and her friends) that women ought to be kept busy with some entirely feminine occupation like sewing or arranging flowers or nursing children until a man wanted their attention. He had not a shred of admiration for women who flew the larger expanses of sea, won motor-racing trophies, wrote brilliant novels, or managed big business. He admired women only for being pretty, docile, and well-dressed.” 

AMY: Boo! Get off my page! And yet, despite his selfishness and chauvinism, Viola is completely infatuated with him for the entirety of the novel, and they end up dancing together at the proverbial ball, but their subsequent encounters upset Viola, who describes him as “beastly.” And at this point as the reader, you’re thinking: “What kind of fairy tale is this?” It’s not exactly what we were expecting.

KIM: Yes, and that’s what you should be thinking, because Gibbons is obviously subverting the whole idea of a fairy tale with this novel. There’s this sense that the ideal prize is really just an illusion that people are chasing. Maybe there is no happily ever after, even for the people who get exactly what they want?

AMY: So while Viola and Victor Spring are having their hot-and-heavy, but also disconcerting tete-a-tetes, there’s another blossoming romance in the works. 

KIM: Yes. Viola’s sister in law, Tina Withers, who is pushing forty, starts up an illicit romance with the family’s chauffeur, Saxon, who is 12 years her junior. But when the town drunk, a hermit who lives in a shack in the woods, publicly calls them out for sleeping together, Tina gets cast out of the house in disgrace. 

AMY: This is basically a riches-to-rags story, a kind of reverse “Cinderella” if you will, and it’s really sweet, I think, but my favorite scene in the whole book is when the Tina/Saxon drama comes to a head, especially when Tina launches into a whole speech about how she’s been “sexually starved for years.” It was awesome. You almost had to gasp out loud as that scene spilled onto the page. Gibbons writes, “Her family were all raw-minded about sex; their natures all had that one secret, sore place and when it was touched, they winced and ran mad. Only they themselves knew what old longings and crushed miseries her warm naked truths had let out of prison. But millions of people were like that.” Wow, girl!

KIM: Uh, yeah, I think there’s a reason people thought maybe that she was Evelyn Waugh because that rings very “Evelyn Waugh-ish.” I was so rooting for Tina in that moment, too! But she’s not the only spirited young woman in this novel. Victor’s 21-year-old cousin, Hetty, is a real spitfire, too. She always says exactly what she thinks (to the shock and horror of Victor’s mother and fiancee, Phyllis). She’s obsessed with literature and feminism and learning, and she seems to exist on this higher mental plane than anyone else in the book.

AMY: Yeah, I like to think Hetty is the character closest to Gibbons’ own personality. I’m imagining that. She’s witty, shrewd, progressive, and doesn’t give a damn about societal expectations, and she absolutely hates Victor’s fiancee, Phyllis. She calmly states over breakfast one morning, “I detest her. To me she typifies all the varnished vulgarity and falseness of this horrifying age. Everything that she is, poetry is not. I wish that she would die, preferably violently.”

KIM: Tell us what you really think! Without giving the rest of the story away, we’ll just say that, like all fairy tales, this one ends happily for pretty much everyone … or does it?

AMY: Yeah, that’s the big question. Every character, in one way or another, ends up getting exactly what they were after all along, and yet, as Gibbons catalogues their fate, we learn that no one is actually entirely satisfied, except for maybe the D.O.M. -- the dirty-old-man Hermit who lives in the woods (who, Kim, in my mind, needs to be played in the movie by Ian McShane. That’s who I pictured the whole time). 

KIM: Oh, yeah. That’s great.

AMY: So the book’s ambivalent ending really reminded me of that final scene of The Graduate, when Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross are sitting at the back of the bus, like “Okay, now what?” and we hear the opening bars of “Hello Darkness, my old friend….” You know, it’s sort of, like, bittersweet?

KIM: That is the best comparison! That’s great. And I also wanted to bring up another interesting aspect of the book. The wooded area between the Withers’ home and the Springs’ home has special significance. While the human stories unfolding are jarringly, almost depressingly real, the wood seems to hold all of that fairy tale magic. Her description of the natural beauty and the birds living in this part of the English countryside… it’s all juxtaposed against the materialism and the general misery of these characters.

AMY: Yeah, and when I read that Gibbons was a huge fan of Keats, all those references to birdsong, and that feeling of freedom in nature versus the constraints of society, sort of made sense — especially putting it in the context of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” which is basically a poem all about the fact that happiness is just kind of illusory or ephemeral for humans. I think that’s maybe where she was getting the title from, frankly. And at the end of Keats’ poem, he wonders if the nightingale was actually really there or if it was all just a dream.

KIM: Right, and that ties into the last few lines of the novel, too, but we’ll leave that to you, as the reader, to experience for yourself. Now, what do we think Gibbons was trying to say with Nightingale Wood?

AMY: I think maybe that there’s just no such thing as “happily ever after,” you know? She references Shakespeare a lot in the book, including, at one point, the phrase “violent delights have violent ends.” And it’s a very cynical take on romance, I think, and it’s a rude awakening of sorts. Even Phyllis, who is Victor Spring’s fiancee at the beginning of the book, she goes on to marry a minister of parliament, but Gibbons writes: “Sometimes when she and the M.P. are going home from a party at five in the morning, she observes to the M.P. that life is very different from what you thought it was going to be when you were a kid. But the M.P. is too tired to ask her what she thought it was going to be, and even if he did, it is possible that she could not remember.” It’s kind of wistful, you know?

KIM: Yeah, I agree.

AMY: So Kim, this idea of these idyllic childhood fairytales really got me thinking about the stories that we tell our children, particularly our daughters. So, you know, Julia’s 11 now, and she’s already been through and is now past her fascination with princesses, but there was a point in time where she was all-in. Her obsession took hold when she was about two years old, without my even introducing her to it (it was her babysitter who got that ball rolling), but I was fine to let her, you know, go with that princess fantasy, because the joy she took in it. I didn’t want to throw a wet blanket on it. But what do you think though? Do you see princesses and that whole trope as problematic? Would you try to steer Cleo away from it as she grows older?

KIM: That’s interesting. I actually have thought about it. And my niece, Chloe, went through a princess phase. She’s now 11 and she is completely into the Marvel superhero thing, so it totally wore off and she went in the other direction. I think with Cleo, if she’s interested, I’d let her enjoy it and then hope when she’s a little older, it can maybe be something we can talk about a little bit more. I have a feeling trying to steer her away from it wouldn’t really work. It might do the opposite. And I’d probably also try to find some really positive, modern princess stories, too… I know there are more of those these days and you probably have some great suggestions for that, having been through that phase.

AMY: For sure, in the last decade we’re starting to have representations of more feminism in fairy tales. And I think Disney finally gets it. We’ve seen a switch in movies like Frozen and Brave and even Mulan, which was prior to 10 years ago, where the women are the heroes and it’s not solely about landing the guy. There’s also a great scene with all the Disney Princesses in the Wreck It Ralph sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet that sort of turns that idea of helpless princesses on its head in a really fun way. So I think times are changing, but I do love that Stella Gibbons, back in the Thirties, was clearly light years ahead of her time in raising some of these issues.

KIM: Yes, I think that definitely goes to show that she wasn’t just a one-hit-wonder. So what did we learn from today’s episode? 

AMY: Well, we were reminded that Ernest Hemingway really would be super annoying to go shopping with.

KIM: Yes … and probably super annoying to do most things with. But we also learned that Prince Charmings, when you scratch the surface, aren’t all they’re cracked up to be either.

AMY: We learned that the times, fortunately, are changing when it comes to modern fairytales.  

KIM: Thank goodness. And we learned that there’s a lot more to Stella Gibbons’ writing than whatever nastiness is in that woodshed. (And seriously, do read Cold Comfort Farm if you haven’t already to understand that reference.) You will thank us later.

AMY: But if you want to thank us now, there’s a way you could do that. Consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast. It’s the single most important thing you can do to help us grow our audience and help other book-minded people find us. It’s a fast and easy way to show your support for us, and we’d be so grateful.

KIM: Yes, and we really hope you enjoyed this episode. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

AMY: Do you have ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know. For further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. 

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KIM: And tune in again next week to help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. “Lost Ladies of Lit” is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.