By summer’s end, things have evolved in a somewhat surprising, but entirely fitting way.Ī Pink Front Door centers around Daisy, a young wife and mother who seems to not have enough to do and must busy herself with helping friends and neighbors, not all of whom deserve it or are grateful. She finds that things are not all clean and aboveboard in the mountains, and as a variety of guests (some unauthorized by the chalet’s invalid owner) converge on the Alpine meadows, becomes a bemused observer of a very human comedy. In The Swiss Summer, Lucy, a middle-aged English matron finds herself accepting a surprise invitation to spend the summer at a Swiss chalet - a dream for her since she loved the country on her honeymoon visit years ago. Here’s a summary of my whirlwind Gibbons tour. I’m not sure how she performs this magic, but it kept me reading through four of her novels with a constant rueful smile on my face, and saving the last ( The Woods in Winter) for a time when I need extra cheering up. This means that Gibbons accomplishes the remarkable feat of keeping me engaged with her characters even when they are not particularly likeable or relatable. On the DSP site, Elizabeth Goudge is quoted as saying “Stella Gibbons sees people as they really are but she observes them so lovingly as well as acutely that one loves them too.” This is a fine assessment, I think, and links Gibbons’s work with Goudge’s own, as well as with another writer I love, Jane Gardam - all sharp yet un-jaded observers of human nature. Best known for her popular parody of the “loam and lovechild” school of fiction, Cold Comfort Farm, she later wrote a number of other novels of quite a different flavor, several of which are now available from Dean Street Press. Stella Gibbons seems to be a master at this type of book. If the scenery of that place is attractive, so much the better, but mostly it’s about the people, slipping into their hopes and fears and dreams, letting go of my own convoluted problems for a while. Sometimes all I ask from a book is to transport me to someplace different so I can meet and live with another set of people for a while.
Stella Gibbons, The Swiss Summer (1951), A Pink Front Door (1959), The Weather at Tregulla (1962), The Snow-Woman (1969)
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