Money and envy in Stella Gibbons's My American

This article in the series inspired by Stella Gibbons’s My American contains some minor material of particular interest.

The power of money
Stella Gibbons obviously knew the value of money. Some of her books describe the big difference that a small increase in someone's wages - or even a few extra coins - can make. 

She informs us that the Beeding children were rather afraid of their mother – until they became old enough to leave school and start earning some money for themselves:

“All three were larger, more self-confident, less afraid of their mother than they had been three years ago. Mona and Maurice’s weekly pay envelopes had done that for them...Dora had recently been given a rise of five shillings a week and promoted to taking letters in Spanish, which had considerably increased her ambition and self-respect.”

There are some good points here. I know from experience that having an income of one's own – money that has been fairly earned from suitable work, reflects competence and is a by-product of self-improvement – does indeed increase morale and self-assurance. A certain amount of independence is no bad thing; people treat you better when they know that you have other options.

Stella Gibbons balances the positive effect that earning a wage has on the young Beedings with an account of Amy Lee's increasing unhappiness after she becomes very wealthy: 

“It is commonly admitted that money is delightful: but it must also be admitted that money is not much use if you happen to want things which money cannot buy. There is no extraordinary merit in wanting such things; to want them does not give you the right to despise other people who want the things that money can buy; it only means that your money, though useful, will not be more important to you than anything else in the world.

Amy did not know what she wanted; but she was already sure that money could not buy it. She was deeply unhappy, and her unhappiness grew deeper every week. Her luxurious home, her lovely clothes, the charming and intelligent people to whom Lady Welwoodham had introduced her, did not make her one atom less unhappy.”

Stella Gibbons’s My American and writing: Part III

There comes a time when Amy Lee changes direction: she stops producing tales of heroism and adventure and joins the school of domestic realism. 

The  reasons given for this drastic transformation are rather contrived and not altogether convincing. I suspect that this element was introduced mainly for the sake of the plot and to make some points; Stella Gibbons could also have used it to clear up some unfinished business of her own .

From danger and death to domesticity

As a child Amy Lee scribbles non-stop, producing exciting adventure stories such as Pharaoh’s Curse: A Tale of  Ancient Egypt and The Wolf of Leningrad: A Thrilling Story of The Russian Revolution purely for her own enjoyment. The books she reads fire her imagination and provide the ideas for her stories.

As a young woman, she writes exciting adventure stories for publication.  She may not have any first-hand knowledge, any personal experience, of the sort of people and action that she writes about, but her readers love her work. She becomes a best-seller; her books are made into films and this gains her world-wide popularity.

After moving to America, Amy Lee changes track and writes a very different kind of story for a whole new constituency of readers:

“Her stories of family life communicated (because she herself felt it) to the passing of an examination or the breaking of a betrothal the excitement she had once given to escapes from death and last-minute rescues, and she charmed her readers by showing them the variety and interest of every day.”

So what happened here? Why did Amy abandon her heroic avatars? Why the farewell to adventure in favour of embracing mundane subject matters? One of the reasons given is that Amy's adventure stories lack moral values; they are in some ways unethical, unedifying and unwholesome, something that she is unaware of until she visits America and comes in for some direct criticism. She also cools off after experiencing danger, death amd great fear at first hand.

Stella Gibbons, white magic and balancing the books

Feelings of depression and of being psychically poisoned are not the only problems faced by suggestible and impressionable readers.

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.

Mary Webb’s legacy: curse or coincidence?

Stella Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm as an antidote to and comic parody of a certain type of fiction: the rural novel as written by authors such as Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. 

I have never been able to see the attraction of what is known as the ‘Loam and Lovechild School of Fiction’ myself  - not even Thomas Hardy’s books have the power to hold my attention – but when I read in an article I found online while researching Stella Gibbons that Stella once expressed her regret to the writer Michael Pick that she had parodied Mary Webb "because she had such an unhappy life", followed by “This was perhaps oversensitive. Webb had, after all, died five years before the publication of Cold Comfort Farm. Her life, though dogged by illness and depression, was by no means without happiness, and her childhood, compared with Stella's, had been idyllic”, I became curious about Mary Webb and decided to investigate further. 

I read the biographies The Flower of Light and Mary Webb, both by Gladys Mary Coles, and the novel Precious Bane, which is generally considered to be Mary Webb’s masterpiece.  

I found some familiar scenarios in Precious Bane; I decided to produce this article after reading about what happened to Mary Webb’s husband after her death.