The Woods in Winter

 

The Woods in Winter / Stella Gibbons
Dean Street Press, 2021, c1970.
209 p.

I thought I'd try another Stella Gibbons book, as I never really got along too well with Cold Comfort Farm (a huge success which dogged her career until she was sick of it!). This was an interesting one -- written in the 70s but taking place in the 30s, back between the wars. 

It features Ivy Gower, a no-nonsense, thrice-widowed charwoman, who finds out that she has been left a cottage in the country but an old uncle. It's no great shakes; a bit tumbledown, with mice and cockroaches in the kitchen and a hole in the the thatch, but it's hers. And she settles in, happy to have all animals around her including her kitchen visitors. She does seem to have a particular connection to animals.

Before she leaves London for good, though, she returns to her neighbourhood and steals a dog that has been locked up alone and been barking for weeks (the book opens with the barking, barking, barking...). She takes him with her to the country, where they settle in comfortably. Ivy isn't interested in being any part of the community however. She likes it on her own. But slowly there are a few connections made, in particular, a child who ends up living with her for a while and for whom she develops affection. 

There are a bunch of side characters of the kinds found in Gibbons novels - spinsters, down-on-their-luck gentry, wholesome working folks, and so on. There are some intriguing romantic situations between classes, and the usual skewering of the Bloomsbury types. It's a good read, kept from being sentimental by Ivy's rather close-lipped solitary nature. There are some high points and happiness found among all the melancholy overtones. 

The book finishes in the 70s, as the self-referential character Helen Green, a writer, comes to the village and gives a sort of epilogue to many of the characters. This casts a shade of bittersweet reflection over the book as a whole, at least for me. It ends the book on a note of loss and regret for those years in which life was really happening. I found this sad in a way, even though I hadn't grown too attached to the characters; the writing holds you a bit at a distance. But I did find it compelling reading, and want to try a few more of her novels now.