Posthumous comebacks are all the rage. First Johnny Cash’s son announces that a never-heard album by the late country singer would be released this spring, and now Stella Gibbons’s daughter has revealed that the late country novel satirist left behind the manuscripts of two never-read novels.
Laura Nicholson, whose mother is the author of Cold Comfort Farm, tells the Camden New Journal this week that the unread pages had been tucked away in a drawer since Gibbons’s death in 1989.
According to Nicholson, the first novel, An Alpha, is about a young woman from the Far East who moves to Britain and becomes a successful writer, while the second, The Yellow Houses, is “a bit of a ghost story, about a house where spirits flourished”.
Cold Comfort Farm, the debut novel that made Gibbons a literary star when published in 1932 — and which was adapted for film in 1995, starring Kate Beckinsale — is an affectionate satire of the kind of melodramatic rural novel in which, as Punch once put it, “peasants have babies in cowsheds and push each other down wells”.
Gibbons had a pioneering career as a journalist at the Evening Standard before becoming a successful novelist (there’s hope for us all!). She went on to publish 31 more books.
Publishers are sure to leap at the chance to get their hands on the manuscripts: when Vintage Classics recently re-issued 13 of Gibbons’s novels they sold out so fast that publishers had to race to order a second print run.
