19 Jan 2014 17:33:03
The novelist Stella Gibbons, who delighted a generation of girls with her rural satire Cold Comfort Farm, left behind two unpublished novels – including a ghost story – when she died in 1989, her family revealed this week.
Gibbons was also the author of 24 other novels, three volumes of short stories and four volumes of poetry, and has enjoyed something of a renaissance after many years languishing out of print. Fourteen of her novels were brought back into print by Vintage Classics in 2011, complete with loving new introductions from the likes of Lynne Truss and Alexander McCall Smith. Now her daughter Laura Richardson has revealed that Gibbons also wrote two further novels, which have never been published.
"The first is called An Alpha and is about a young woman who is from the far east. She moves to Britain and becomes a successful writer," Richardson told the Camden New Journal.
"The second is called The Yellow Houses and is a bit of a ghost story. My mother converted to Christianity after meeting my father – she had been brought up an atheist – and they dabbled in spiritualism. This novel deals with that and other issues such as reincarnation. It was about a house where spirits flourished. They were finished and I would love to see them published."
Anna Davis, who represents Gibbons's literary estate, said she had yet to see the novels but was "very excited" to learn of their existence. "She was a novelist who wrote lots of novels but for a lot of years was thought of as one-novel author," she said. "For many years she was seen as really unfashionable, and nobody was very interested in her work. That has changed, with Vintage Classics' brilliant reissue of her backlist … [and] I'm very excited to get to read these novels."
Vintage Classics senior editor Frances Macmillan, Gibbons's publisher, agreed that "the unpublished novels certainly sound intriguing and we look forward to reading them".
"As brilliant as it is, it's a little unfair that Cold Comfort Farm overshadowed the rest of Stella Gibbons's work for so long," said Macmillan. "She wrote many more books that were just as funny, insightful, romantic and wise. It was really pleasing to see readers explore and embrace these lesser-known books, such as Westwood and Starlight, when we reissued them, and it's exciting to have the chance to keep feeding that new appetite for Gibbons's work."
