Stella Gibbons and some libraries

Terry Pratchett is not the only writer of interest who both feasted on library books and created books for other library users to read.

Stella Gibbons, whose life and books have been featured on here, is another writer who both took out and put in. My first encounter with her work was via books that came from the public library. 

Internal evidence from her books suggests to me that Stella Gibbons considered libraries to be an important part of life and that she was very familiar with the various types, not to mention the differing social classes and educational and intellectual levels of the members.

She found much good reading material on the family bookshelves when young, but probably joined a public library too.

As an adult she was a user of her local public library for many years. She may also have subscribed to a circulating library as they were still going strong in the first half of the 20th century despite the competition from the free public libraries and she features two of them in one of her books.

Georgette Heyer and Stella Gibbons: some coincidences

For me, even the best of Georgette Heyer’s books are, or rather were, mere escape material and comfort reading. I have not read any of them for a very long time as they have lost much of their earlier appeal. I don’t remember seeing anything in any of them that would be relevant to the themes of this blog.

Stella Gibbons’s novels are primarily a source of material for articles about unseen influences: there are references to Stella Gibbons and her books in a few articles on here.

These two novelists have more elements of their lives in common than I would have expected, considering how very different their novels are. I looked at the major similarities and differences in their lives and personalities to see if I could see any patterns and detect any unseen influences at work. Although I found much fascinating and informative material, most of it is not very relevant to this blog. I did find a few interesting coincidences however. 

It is customary to leave the best till last, but I want to start with the most bizarre and unexpected material that I found while researching the two authors:

Novels and the Nazis
It is quite a coincidence that the names of both writers were known to the Nazi regime - for very different reasons.

Georgette Heyer had some of her books banned in Nazi Germany, whereas one of Stella Gibbons’s was translated into German and presented to Adolf Hitler!

There is little information available about which of Georgette Heyer’s books were banned and why. All we know is that Georgette Heyer considered it rather a compliment to be banned and said that it was ‘grand’!