Stuck in a Book

Lots of Stella Gibbons’ novels have come back into print in recent years – from Vintage and from Dean Street Press – but Miss Linsey and Pa (1936) has been notably missing from their lists. Having read it for the 1936 Club, I can sadly see why it wouldn’t fit into 21st-century publishing. And yet it’s my favourite of her non-Cold-Comfort-Farm novels that I’ve read so far.

Miss Bertie Linsey and her Pa move to London to be near Bertie’s uncle – Mr Petley – and his son Len, realising that they need family connections now that they are falling on harder times. They leave behind an idyllic countryside home that comes with plenty of beautiful trees and green spaces, but no source of income. They are emphatically not invited to live with Mr Petley and Len above their tobacconist’s shop, but Mr Petley goes as far as to find them accommodation at the nearby home of the Fells. Mr Petley doesn’t trust any accommodation outside of Radford Street, and thinks that Miss Linsey and Pa will manage to make do with the dingy, beetle-infested home run by Mrs Fell. Mr Fell, meanwhile, keeps birds in the upper rooms and seldom communicates with anybody at all.

Gibbons has given us a wonderful cast here, even if we got no more (and we get some great other people). Miss Linsey is resilient, managing to be both enthusiastic and rather sad. Pa is happier than she to get to know the Fells, but is also drawn to know the local pub. Mr Petley is quite hardened and wants little to do with his in-laws, and is affectionately controlling of his son – whose life, and love, was left in France in the First World War two decades earlier.

There is quite an emotional core to this novel, particularly in Len’s storyline of the woman he loves in France – I found a lot of it very moving. But there are also plenty of opportunities for Gibbons’ satirical streak, that I haven’t seen have such a delightful outing in any of the other non-Cold-Comfort-Farm novels. In Miss Linsey and Pa, she has her sights on spearing Bloomsbury – because Miss Linsey finds work first as a cook-housekeeper at the home of Dorothy Hoad and E.V. Lassiter, and later as a sort of governess for a household with very strict rules on not telling the child stories and always calling everything by its proper name. These were my favourite sections – here’s how we first meet Miss Hoad, coming into the tobacconist and meeting Miss Linsey:

She nodded and, turning her back, stared out into the street with her dark unhappy eyes. What would E.V. be doing? She looked down at her platinum watch, of so fiercely modernist a design that it suggested a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Half-past three. E.V. might be trying to write, with the wave of hair falling into her eyes.

She turned round again as the drab man came back into the shop with a smaller and even drabber woman. G*d, how awful it must be to be that kind of person and live that kind of life!

And here is one of the many very funny snapshots of Bloomsbury life:

The women friends of Dorothy and herself used frequently to announce that they must have a child.

They would plomp themselves on the sofa, fling up their feet and put their elbows behind their heads and stare at the ceiling. Then they would say abruptly ‘I must have a child.’

‘You ought to have a child,’ they would say bluntly, when one of their number complained of a headache or an inability to finish writing a novel. Sometimes they had the child (they never called it a baby), sometimes they got no further than plomping on the sofa and announcing that they ought to have one.

For quite a short novel, an awful lot goes on – perhaps because there are four central characters who get our attention and sympathy, and plenty of secondary ones who are equally interesting. The combination of satire and pathos works because we aren’t asked to combine those feelings for any particular individual – rather our laughter at Bloomsbury, say, is part of what makes Miss Linsey’s difficult life so moving. And the climactic moment of the novel succeeds in being dramatic and poignant in a way that feels honest to everything that has preceded – including layers to Mr Fell, who could easily have been a one-note character experiencing unspecified mental illness.

And why wouldn’t it be published now? Well, sadly Gibbons includes portraits of a Black character, a Jewish character, and a lesbian that are all inappropriate to differing degrees. Some in that well-intentioned ‘You won’t believe this character is from X minority and yet isn’t Y’ way that is hardly any more palatable than out and out racism. These elements are very much not the main thrust of the novel, though it would also be hard to neatly excise them.

There’s a conversation to be had about the moral responsibility of reprint publishing, and perhaps that’s a topic for another day – but no author is ‘owed’ reprinting, and any publisher is likely to decide this isn’t worth the fight. And it’s a shame that these parts pull Miss Linsey and Pa back, because it is otherwise a wonderful triumph of a novel – and, with those caveats, perhaps my favourite read of the year so far.