Westwood
As seen:
By Stella Gibbons, and and, Lynne Truss
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1 review
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LYNNE TRUSS
‘Stella Gibbons is the Jane Austen of the twentieth century’ The Times
Set in wartime London, Westwood tells the story of Margaret Steggles, a plain bookish girl whose mother has told her that she is not the type that attracts men. Her schoolfriend Hilda has a sunny temperament and keeps her service boys ‘ever so cheery’. When Margaret finds a ration book on Hampstead Heath the pompous writer Gerard Challis enters both their lives. Margaret slavishly adores Challis and his artistic circle; Challis idolises Hilda for her hair and her eyes and Hilda finds Gerard’s romantic overtures a bit of a bind. This is a delightfully comic and wistful tale of love and longing.
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As Lynne Truss says in her introduction, Stella Gibbons tends to be known only for her most famous book, Cold Comfort Farm. I've never read this but I have read Nightingale Wood and The Matchmaker and love her humour and observations. Westwood, written in 1946 is set in wartime London and chronicles two levels of society - the educated working class (the Steggles family) and the wealthy theatrical class represented by the Challis family who live, analogously, up the hill from the Steggles' modest home in Hampstead. Margaret Steggles, who is a young teacher, is smitten by the Challises who events have caused her to have an involvement. The novel depicts the superficiality of their lives and Margaret's awakening from her reverie against the tired, ration stricken, bombed out background of the capital. Gibbons was evidently poking sly fun at the pretentiousness of writer and dramatist, Charles Morgan, who wrote of love, death and art, as does Gerard Challis in the novel and is seen as being out of touch with reality.
