Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons

She was born in London in 1902. She was the oldest of three brothers. His parents, an example of the suburban English middle class, gave him a typically female education. His father, a very unique individual, practiced as a doctor in the poorer suburbs of London, although he had suicidal tendencies, he loved alcohol and laudanum, and was given to the attacks of hatred towards the female gender in general. This turbulent childhood marked Stella Gibbons, who used part of this material to create the grotesque Starkadder, protagonists of his masterpiece, The daughter of Robert Poste. In 1921, Stella enrolled in journalism, and then began working for the British United Press. In 1926, Maudie, Stella's mother, died, and her father followed her a few months later. In 1930, while working at the Evening Standard, he published a book of poems, The Mountain Beast, which received praise from Virginia Woolf herself. The daughter of Robert Poste was published in 1932 and its success was instantaneous (although it was prohibited in the newly born Republic of Ireland for its veiled defense of contraception). In 1934 the novel was awarded the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse. In fact, Gibbons is known almost exclusively for this work, which resulted in the sequels Christmas in Cold Comfort Farm (1940) and Flora Poste and artists (1949), to film adaptations, and which is considered the most perfect comic novel of the English narrative of the twentieth. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, including Basset (1933), Enbury Heath (1935), The Second Life by Viola Wither (1938), Westwood (1946) and Here Be Dragons (1956), as well as three volumes of stories and four books of poetry, most of them very sold and celebrated in the Anglo-Saxon world. She was married for more than twenty-five years with the actor and singer Allan Webb, who died in 1959. He stopped publishing in 1972, although he wrote two novels that were published at his death, a fact that happened in 1989 in London. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery.