When reading the previously mentioned biographical material, I have often felt exasperated by the subjects’ negativity, melodramatic outbursts and self-indulgent behaviour, lack of common sense and blindness to the cause of some of their problems.
Some writers’ chronic money troubles for example could often have been avoided. As for the messy relationships, why did they get involved with such awful people in the first place? Why did they never learn from experience? Why couldn’t they see that they were their own worst enemies!
Reading other books just for their uplifting effect is not enough here: something more is needed. So what are the best solutions?
Stella Gibbons’s solution
Stella Gibbons became so exasperated by the doomy and dismal books of Mary Webb and similar writers that she wrote Cold Comfort Farm both as a parody of rural melodramas and a remedy for the plight of the characters.
She transmuted tragedies into comedies and showed how common sense, determination, good advice and a positive approach could be used to produce solutions for the problems of many miserable and apparently doomed people, transform unsatisfactory lives and bring order out of chaos.
Re-writing the scenarios to give them a positive outcome as Stella Gibbons did is a good way to break the spell; it can even be a form of white magic.
Something like this happens in Sheri S. Tepper’s Marianne Trilogy, when an ally who is a white magician replaces a series of sinister gifts sent to Marianne by a black witch with similar but wholesome gifts to reverse the evil effects.
Spell and counter-spell
Stella Gibbons played the fairy godmother on paper. Many of the characters in her other books are ordinary people. She eases many of them into the life that is best for them, considering their age, abilities, options and the society they live in.
Subjects of biographical material are another matter, and not many of the readers will have Stella Gibbons’s ability to write fiction in which everything is reworked for the better. So what else can be done as a counter-spell?
Performing certain mental exercises is one solution. This is more positive and productive than just being infuriated by the subjects of the books and their actions.
Instead of wondering angrily why they made such terrible choices, we can try to understand what forces, what unseen influences, were at work in their lives to make them the way they were and cause them to do what they did.
Thinking of what else they could have done and mentally passing on useful information, making helpful suggestions to them and shining light on the darkness of their lives could act as a form of psychological white magic too.
Sometimes exasperation is followed by guilt for thinking such things about people who suffered so much and had such terrible lives. For this reason, Stella Gibbons once expressed her regret that she had parodied Mary Webb’s books.
This regret seems misplaced.
Mary Webb had been dead for several years when Cold Comfort Farm was published so never knew about it. The income from this book enabled Stella Gibbons to concentrate on her writing and produce other novels.
The entertainment it has provided for many generations of readers and the demonstration of how to deal with disorderly lives surely justifies its creation. Stella Gibbons said that she became a much nicer person after writing it. Perhaps the exorcism of other people’s demons had the magical effect of exorcising some of her own.
