Stella Gibbons’s Juliet: different, difficult and defiant

I didn’t expect to think of anything more to say about Stella Gibbons’s books, and I knew that as she died in 1989 there wouldn’t be any more of them.

I learned recently that two manuscripts she left to her estate have been published. I didn’t expect to like the new books - I prefer Stella Gibbons’s earlier to her later books - and I didn’t expect to find anything relevant to this blog either.

The stories contain anachronisms and anomalies, recycled and repurposed characters and other material that I recognised from her previous books, and I can’t say that I enjoying reading them for their own sake very much.

However, some of what I read in Pure Juliet (a draft that was completed in 1978 and retitled from An Alpha) resonated enough to inspire an article.

I want to concentrate on one character, the eponymous Juliet, and the most relevant aspects in this book: by coincidence, Juliet’s main interest in life is the study of coincidences.

Juliet’s personality

It seems to me that Stella Gibbons wanted to create and describe someone who was in many ways her exact opposite. She has not done too bad a job of it. Much of what she says about Juliet’s character and behaviour is familiar, and some of it could apply to INTJ girls. I can identify with a lot of it.

The life of Ayn Rand: some more familiar features

Barbara Branden’s biography The Passion of Ayn Rand provided the source material for the article about some familiar features from

Ayn Rand's childhood.

There are many more examples of characteristics, viewpoints and experiences that Ayn Rand shares with other people, including me, to be found in this book.

Some more basic elements of Ayn Rand’s personality

There is little evidence that Ayn Rand possessed a sense of humour. She may not have had much common sense either. This is very reminiscent of Elizabeth Taylor’s character Angel.

She needed to control others.

She could be selfish and thoughtless, for example when she uprooted her husband from a life he loved and that suited him perfectly because she wanted to move to New York. This is very like what Angel did to her mother.

Just like Angel, Ayn Rand lacked introspection and showed no humility.

Ayn Rand considered herself to be the supreme authority on what had worth and what did not and what was right and what was wrong; she judged people by her own standards and was contemptuous and intolerant of and dismissive towards people who didn’t make the grade.

Where she saw no unusual intelligence – nor the capacity for dedicated productive work that she believed to be its consequence – she saw no value.

She had little understanding of family ties, emotional connections and people’s feelings. Very few people mattered to her in a personal way. To the end of her life, she dismissed anyone who had a deep need for the company of other people as being essentially without value.

Ayn Rand was passionately anti mysticism and pro reason.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - MBTI

I lived much of my life without ever hearing of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which is a form of personality assessment. 

I had always assumed that personality tests were superficial, generalised and irrelevant and had never taken any interest in them. Someone mentioned the MBTI to me a few years ago: she asked me what my MB type was. I was interested, and decided to give it a go after finding some free tests online. 

In all cases, I came out very strongly as INTJ: introversion, intuition, thinking, judgement.  

I read some good quality material describing the characteristics of this type and listing possible career options:  it all seemed spot on. It explained a hell of a lot.  It confirmed some things I had always known or suspected. I have always said, “Does it work?” and expected things to make sense, and this is exactly what the descriptions say INTJs do!