The Bachelor

Description

' Gibbons has a marvellous eye for the social scene - no-one is more accurate' - John Braine, author of Room at the Top Brother and sister, Constance and Kenneth Fielding live in calm respectability, just out of reach of London and the Blitz. But when a series of uninvited guests converge upon them - from a Balkan exile to Ken's old flame and the siblings' own raffish father - the household struggles to preserve its precious peace. In this full house, in a quiet corner of suburbia, no one expects to find romance.

Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems, The Mountain Beast (1930) and her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) won the Femina Vie Heuruse Prize for 1933. Among her works are Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940) Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

[Gibbons has] a marvellous eye for the social scene - no-one is more accurate Chipper is the word: Gibbons's heroines are plucky, determined and quietly hedonistic. But she can do melancholy with the best of them, too, not to mention melodrama * Guardian * Stella Gibbons...an exception to that old canard: women can't make us laugh * Independent * The Jane Austen of the 20th century -- Lynne Truss Stella is stellar * Sunday Herald *