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Stella Gibbons Quotes

Stella Dorothea Gibbons was an English author, journalist, and poet. She established her reputation with her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm which has been reprinted many times. Although she was active as a writer for half a century, none of her later 22 novels or other literary works—which included a sequel to Cold Comfort Farm—achieved the same critical or popular success. Much of her work was long out of print before a modest revival in the 21st century.

The daughter of a London doctor, Gibbons had a turbulent and often unhappy childhood. After an indifferent school career she trained as a journalist, and worked as a reporter and features writer, mainly for the Evening Standard and The Lady. Her first book, published in 1930, was a collection of poems which was well received, and through her life she considered herself primarily a poet rather than a novelist. After Cold Comfort Farm, a satire on the genre of rural-themed "loam and lovechild" novels popular in the late 1920s, most of Gibbons's novels were based within the middle-class suburban world with which she was familiar.

Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Her style has been praised by critics for its charm, barbed humour and descriptive skill, and has led to comparison with Jane Austen. The impact of Cold Comfort Farm dominated her career, and she grew to resent her identification with the book to the exclusion of the rest of her output. Widely regarded as a one-work novelist, she and her works have not been accepted into the canon of English literature—partly, other writers have suggested, because of her detachment from the literary world and her tendency to mock it. Wikipedia  

✵ 5. January 1902 – 19. December 1989
Stella Gibbons photo

Works

Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
Stella Gibbons: 12 quotes0 likes

Famous Stella Gibbons Quotes

“She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

“Like all really strong-minded women, on whom everybody flops, she adored being bossed about. It was so restful.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

“One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favorite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

“I saw something nasty in the woodshed.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

“Mary, you know I hate parties. My idea of hell is a very large party in a cold room where everybody has to play hockey properly.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

“Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation?”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons Quotes

“That would be delightful,' agreed Flora, thinking how nasty and boring it would be.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

“Flora inherited, however, from her father a strong will and from her mother a slender ankle. The one had not been impaired by always having her own way nor the other by the violent athletic sports in which she had been compelled to take part, but she realized that neither was adequate as an equipment for earning her keep.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Chapter 1.

“By god, D. H. Lawrence was right when he had said there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Chapter 20.

“The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Foreword.
Cf. Thomas Hobbes — "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", in Leviathan (1651), Pt. I, Ch. 13.
Cold Comfort Farm (1932)

“The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Chapter 1.

“…whereas there still lingers some absurd prejudice against living on one's friends, no limits are set, either by society or by one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose upon one's relatives.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Chapter 1.

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