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.
