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.

Stella Benson and some travel nightmares

In addition to being a novelist, Stella Benson was a travel writer.

Despite her poor health, she took on many challenging journeys. She wrote articles about her travels and later compiled them into books. She also logged everything in her diaries. These records give many examples of the dangers and difficulties that she met and the risks that she took while on the road.

There is one particular episode that looks like a nightmare scenario to me. It has some familiar elements.

The walking tour nightmare

While Stella Benson was exploring the US in 1918, a new female friend in New England proposed a walking tour.

The final leg involved walking 18 miles through the night to catch a train at 05:30.

They left very little margin for error, which was a big mistake. They got lost and went several miles out of their way; it took a while to find someone to put them back on the right road. At 4:00 am they still had six miles or so to go. The backwoods people were infuriatingly unhelpful: no one would give them a lift.

They had only 15 minutes left when they met a man in a milk cart. They offered him money to turn round and take them to the station; after pondering for a while, he refused. Then they met a man in an empty car and waved and shouted. He slowed down a little then laughed, told them to get off the road and drove on.

When they were one mile from the station, they heard the puffing of the train and saw smoke; they gave up, assuming that they were too late. They walked slowly towards the station, feeling awful because after all their efforts they had missed their train.

When they were within 100 yards of the station, they noticed that the train had backed in again. They made one last, desperate, torturing effort, running as never before, and reached the platform only to see the back of the train disappear round the bend.

“Defeated and robbed of pride we threw ourselves on our backs in mid-platform.”

Marianne and the nightmare scenario

Stella Benson and Charlotte Brontë are not the only people whose descriptions of nightmare scenarios have inspired some articles.

The Marianne Trilogy by Sheri S. Tepper gives an example of someone who, just like Lucy Snowe in Villette, gets into the exact nightmare situation that she dreads the most.

In the article about the Marianne books I mentioned a laundry world. This alien dream world appears in Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods, the second book in the trilogy. The city that Marianne has been banished to by the evil witch Madame Delubovoska has a very strange attribute: it changes its name and rearranges itself every day around midnight, so the inhabitants need a new map for each day.

The rules are very strict; maps must be bought on the previous day, and it is a both a crime and extremely dangerous not to have one. Being without a map is something to be avoided at all costs.

Marianne runs a public laundry in the city. Her worst fear comes upon her one day when she forgets to buy her map for the next day. Despite increasingly desperate efforts in dangerous surroundings, she fails to get a new map.  This puts her into even more danger, and there is a good chance of permanent homelessness and destitution.

It all ends with a safe return to the laundry, but not before she has gone through a terrible ordeal which she has had to cope with entirely on her own.

Diana Wynne Jones’s witch Aunt Maria: part III

A brief summary of Diana Wynne Jones’s Black Maria makes it seem like a complete fantasy, a children’s story that is interesting and entertaining but has little relevance to real life. I have actually found much of it familiar, informative and very useful - not so much the purely supernatural parts but the scenes involving mind control and manipulative behaviour. 

It is ironic that this little book is considered suitable reading for eight-year-olds yet it has caused me to produce so much material that I decided to break my article first into two then into three parts.

Telepathy, spying and psychic attacks
One member of Aunt Maria’s circle gives Mig a book of pictures, the kind a little girl will love. Some of them are indeed of flittery little fairies, but others are frightening and sinister: the worst one is titled ‘A naughty little girl is punished’ and makes Mig feel ill. This seems like a message, a warning, and reminds me of one of the disturbing pictures sent to Marianne in Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore by Sheri S. Tepper.

Diana Wynne Jones’s witch Aunt Maria: part II

I have performed several data mining exercises on Black Maria aka Aunt Maria by Diana Wynne Jones and found a lot of useful material each time I made another pass through the story. There are always more points of interest to be extracted and connections to be made.

Diana Wynne Jones said that Aunt Maria was based on a real person. This might well have been her mother, who by her account was a horrible woman. I have never met anyone quite like Aunt Maria, but some of the actions of her and her circle and the effects that they have on people are very familiar indeed. More and more similarities come to mind each time I go through the book. 

Aunt Maria lures the family into a trap
With people such as Aunt Maria it is important to identify them immediately, if possible avoid them completely and if not begin as we mean to go on and let them know where we stand. Unfortunately, we often realise this too late. 

Sheri S. Tepper’s witch: Madame Delubovoska

Positive paranoia: this is when we believe that people are conspiring to help us and events are being arranged in our favour. This happened to me in the case of The Marianne Trilogy by Sheri S. Tepper, which I wanted to re-read but could not find anywhere. I visited many second-hand bookshops before giving up the hunt. 

I had done everything I could without success, so the universe took a hand. One morning, I experienced a strong inner prompting to visit a small Kentish town with historic associations. I wandered around the back streets, and found a charity shop with a big pile of Sheri S. Tepper’s books in the window.  An omnibus volume of The Marianne Trilogy was among them! I bought the lot for a very reasonable price. Not only did I have some good reading material, I also gained some more inspiration for articles.

Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore introduces a very unpleasant character called Madame Delubovoska, who also appears in Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods, the second book in the trilogy. Before she even comes on the scene we learn that she is a sociopath, a psychopath, someone who uses people and doesn’t care about anyone.