GREAT LITERARY LADY: Flora Poste
Level-headed, selfconsciously modern and pragmatic urbanite Flora, with lashings of common sense and plans to resolve her country relatives’ problems, is normally regarded as the heroine of Stella Gibbons’s hilarious novel from 1932. However, some might claim this role for the long-suff ering, but implacable matriarch of the farm, Ada Doom, whose phrase, recalling a childhood trauma of seeing ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ – so terrible it is never explained – even entered the language.
The novel itself is a wonderful satire of both the popular ‘loam and love child’ genre of novels and rural fatalists such as Thomas Hardy.
Gibbons wrote the novel during her time at The Lady, when among other duties she reviewed contemporary fi ction, but it also owes something to her duties on the Evening Standard newspaper.
The novel’s satire is not limited to ridiculous characters like Judith or Seth Starkadder, or the exaggerated plot twists that hyperbolise the conventions of her target genre, but includes a bizarre rural idiom that mocks the literary phonetic spellings of country dialects and uses made-up terms such as ‘mollocking’.
It surprisingly won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize, which enraged Virginia Woolf. I plump for Flora who teaches Meriam about contraception and encourages Ada to have fun. Virago has recently republished most of Gibbons’s novels, but this is still the best.
The novel itself is a wonderful satire of both the popular ‘loam and love child’ genre of novels and rural fatalists such as Thomas Hardy.
Gibbons wrote the novel during her time at The Lady, when among other duties she reviewed contemporary fi ction, but it also owes something to her duties on the Evening Standard newspaper.
The novel’s satire is not limited to ridiculous characters like Judith or Seth Starkadder, or the exaggerated plot twists that hyperbolise the conventions of her target genre, but includes a bizarre rural idiom that mocks the literary phonetic spellings of country dialects and uses made-up terms such as ‘mollocking’.
It surprisingly won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize, which enraged Virginia Woolf. I plump for Flora who teaches Meriam about contraception and encourages Ada to have fun. Virago has recently republished most of Gibbons’s novels, but this is still the best.