…for the first time in her life, she was living as she had always unknowingly wanted to live: in freedom and solitude, with an animal for close companion. Her new life had acted upon her like a strong and delicious drug.
Ivy Gover, a curmudgeonly middle-aged charwoman with some slightly witchy talents, inherits a rural cottage in Buckinghamshire and takes up residence near the tiny village of Little Warby. Having settled in with a rescued dog and a pet pigeon, she manages, despite her anti-social instincts, to have surprising effects on her new neighbours, including Angela Mordaunt, a spinster still mourning her dead beau, Coral and Pearl Cartaret, ditzy sisters who have just opened a tea shop, the local vicar, and wealthy Lord Gowerville, whose devotion she earns by healing his beloved dog. But her biggest challenge will likely be the 12-year-old runaway who shows up at her door…
Blending vivid characters and a deep knowledge of human nature, this is also a funny and poignant tale of the challenges and freedoms of old age and solitude. The Woods in Winter was first published in 1970 and was the last novel Stella Gibbons wrote for publication. This new edition features an introduction by twentieth-century women’s historian Elizabeth Crawford.
’Stella Gibbons sees people as they really are but she observes them so lovingly as well as acutely that one loves them too’ Elizabeth Goudge
Om författaren
Stella Dorothea Gibbons was born in 1902 in London. She was educated first at home, then the North London Collegiate School for Girls, and finally at University College, London, where she did a two-year course on journalism.Her first job, in 1923, was as cable decoder for British United Press. For the next decade she worked as a London journalist for various publications, including the Evening Standard and The Lady.
Her first published book was a volume of poems in 1930. This was followed by the classic comic novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) which remains her best-known work. In 1933 she met and married Allan Webb, an actor and singer, the marriage lasting until the latter’s death in 1959.
From 1934 until 1970, Stella Gibbons published more than twenty further novels, in addition to short stories and poetry, and there were two further posthumously-published full-length works of fiction. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was awarded a Femina Vie-Heureuse prize in 1933 for Cold Comfort Farm.
Stella Gibbons died on 19 December 1989 at home in London.
Fler e-böcker från samma författare (r) / Redaktör
699 380 E-böcker i denna kategori
