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Book Review: Nightingale Wood
Nov. 28th, 2012 01:17 amStella Gibbons is a British writer from the mid-twentieth century, which makes her almost automatically fascinating to me. (Yes, I may have a problem.) Her most famous book is Cold Comfort Farm, which is exceptionally fluffy fun (with a sprinkling of unfortunate anti-Semitism). It is, in fact, her only famous and widely available book. This, as Nightingale Wood shows, is vastly unfortunate, because she wrote wonderful, stinging but sympathetic books about England between the wars, and I want to read them all.
There are a lot of interesting things in Nightingale Wood. Its treatment of the class structure; its retelling of the Cinderella story; the peculiar bittersweetness of reading a book written in Britain in the late 1930s, by someone who clearly did not imagine that the world she depicted was about to disappear.
But most interesting, I think, are the characters, who are intensely real, endowed with plentiful faults, yet still sympathetic. For instance: the heroine, Viola, is a sweet, kindly, rather silly and shallow girl, eminently sympathetic but not nearly as poetic as her name suggests she might be. Her Prince Charming is...rather dull, actually - and the narrative knows it.
But they are merely the main story, in a tale with myriad delicious subplots!
One of them involves the chauffeur. Apparently I have a chauffeur problem to go with my mid-twentieth-century Britain problem.
(However, aside from his profession and the whole falling-for-the-daughter-of-the-house thing, his story is as un-Sybil & Bransonish as possible.)
The daughter of the house in question is not Viola, but her sister-in-law. One of the things I liked terribly about this book is the looseness of the adaptation. Viola's a widow who did not much love her first husband, rather than a virginal girl; the ugly stepsisters are her sisters-in-law, and neither ugly nor cruel - in fact, one of them becomes Viola's dear friend.
Wikipedia tells me that Gibbons wrote two other fairytale adaptations. The university library has one of them, a retelling of the Snow Queen. Worth checking out, I think.
There are a lot of interesting things in Nightingale Wood. Its treatment of the class structure; its retelling of the Cinderella story; the peculiar bittersweetness of reading a book written in Britain in the late 1930s, by someone who clearly did not imagine that the world she depicted was about to disappear.
But most interesting, I think, are the characters, who are intensely real, endowed with plentiful faults, yet still sympathetic. For instance: the heroine, Viola, is a sweet, kindly, rather silly and shallow girl, eminently sympathetic but not nearly as poetic as her name suggests she might be. Her Prince Charming is...rather dull, actually - and the narrative knows it.
But they are merely the main story, in a tale with myriad delicious subplots!
One of them involves the chauffeur. Apparently I have a chauffeur problem to go with my mid-twentieth-century Britain problem.
(However, aside from his profession and the whole falling-for-the-daughter-of-the-house thing, his story is as un-Sybil & Bransonish as possible.)
The daughter of the house in question is not Viola, but her sister-in-law. One of the things I liked terribly about this book is the looseness of the adaptation. Viola's a widow who did not much love her first husband, rather than a virginal girl; the ugly stepsisters are her sisters-in-law, and neither ugly nor cruel - in fact, one of them becomes Viola's dear friend.
Wikipedia tells me that Gibbons wrote two other fairytale adaptations. The university library has one of them, a retelling of the Snow Queen. Worth checking out, I think.
