From the Bookshelf of Retro Reads…

Nightingale Wood

Stella Gibbons,

Sophie Dahl (Introduction)

Start date: August 7, 2021

Finish date: September 7, 2021

Discussion: Group Reads

Discussion leader: Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 204 topics — 5,396 comments total

Group Reads

* Group Reads for 2024
By Carol She's S… , She's a mod, yeah, yeah, yeah! · 13 posts · 54 views

last updated Apr 05, 2024 11:48AM

Northbridge Rectory 5th of July 2025 read Spoiler thread!
By Carol She's S… , She's a mod, yeah, yeah, yeah! · 8 posts · 15 views

last updated Jul 23, 2025 01:17PM

showing 4 of 4 topics view all »

What Members Thought

Aug 16, 2021 Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂ rated it really liked it

Shelves: classics, satire

Firstly I want to say - just look at the cover of this edition!

Light, effervescent, wonderful colour palette - would have one expecting something Woodhousian, wouldn't one?

Which this book really isn't, even though there are flashes of humour. What this book is is a study of the British Class System and social values at a time (late 1930s) when the world is starting to change.

The widowed (& nearly penniless)Viola feels she has no choice but to accept her starchy in-laws offer of a home. The ...more

53 likes · Like · see review

Sep 12, 2021 Mela rated it it was amazing

Shelves: group-virago-modern-classic, region-british, humor, historical-romance, internet-archive, womens-lot, historical-fiction, historical-period-1914-1945, psychological-and-philosophical

There is nothing like something nasty for bringing people together

He supposed that he wanted her so much that it was making him fond of her;

I am fascinated by Stella Gibbons' style of narrating and seeing people. She wasn't polite or nice to her characters. Sometimes she was simply harsh. So, meeting them, getting to know them can be difficult. I so wanted to like them, but Mrs Gibbons seemed to do all she could to make it hard. And, although, it often gave me the unpleasing feeling that ...more

10 likes · Like · see review

Jun 18, 2009 Mir marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: library-lack

Recently reissued by Virago Modern Classics! Yay!

Because there isn't much plot description on GR I am stealing Robin McKinley's review from her blog until I actually get to read this myself.

Viola Thompson is a shop girl with no prospects and, having no prospects, somewhat reluctantly accepts the proposal of a dull young man named Theodore Wither, because she is not likely to have any others. Theodore, however, is so convenient, or inconvenient, as to die after a year of marriage; and Viola goes Recently reissued by Virago Modern Classics! Yay!

Because there isn't much plot description on GR I am stealing Robin McKinley's review from her blog until I actually get to read this myself.

Viola Thompson is a shop girl with no prospects and, having no prospects, somewhat reluctantly accepts the proposal of a dull young man named Theodore Wither, because she is not likely to have any others. Theodore, however, is so convenient, or inconvenient, as to die after a year of marriage; and Viola goes to live with her in-laws: the appalling Mr Wither, the watery Mrs Wither, the jolly-hockey-sticks Madge and the neurotic Tina in a dire, frigid, over-furnished house marooned in a bit of Essex countryside. Viola is soon lonelier and more miserable than she can comprehend; and with nothing to look forward to, and nothing to think about except the one other large house in the area, where an extremely wealthy and rather handsome young man named Victor Spring lives with his mother and his cousin, gives flashy and dashing house parties, and is the romantic fantasy of every shop girl in Sible Pelden and Chesterbourne. This is not exclusively Viola’s story; Tina, although she has ‘kept her brain exercised by reading heavyish books, which might not always be truly wise but at least were not those meringues of the intellect . . . novels’, is in love with the chauffeur, who is twelve years younger than she is and has a drunken washerwoman for a mother, but is very good-looking: ‘. . . They saw him walk past the window on his afternoon off, wearing a grey suit in which he looked as beautiful as he did in his dark uniform (differing therein from many chauffeurs, whose appearance when in mufti suggests that of escaped convicts).’ And Victor Spring’s cousin, a young woman named Hetty, hates her comfortable, enforced high-bourgeois existence, and can’t wait for her twenty-first birthday, when she is going to run off to London and live in a garret.

Viola is an orphan; she was raised by her father after her mother’s death. He was a passionate amateur actor, and named her Viola after his favourite heroine: ‘She liked to watch her father as he read, and to listen to the smoothly rolling tones; she felt no curiosity about what the words meant. It was only Shakespeare, and she was used to him. . . . But Viola’s father was knocked down by a young man driving a car, and died in an hour.

‘The young man was fined, and had some severe remarks made about him, and drove away from the court faster than ever because he was so cross . . .’ which is to say this is Cinderella with an edge. As Mrs Theodore Wither Viola ‘was not very happy, because after he was married to her, Teddy discovered that she was not so poetic and marvellous as he had supposed, and naturally this made him less fond of her’. Of the exciting house on the far side of the nightingale wood: ‘The telephone rang every half-hour or so. Vans from Harrods, from Fortnum and Mason and Cartier, came up to the house . . . These were for Mrs Spring, whose hobby was shopping.’

This being Cinderella, there has to be a ball, and Viola has to go to it, and meet, and dance with, Prince Charming; and there is and she does. But then the ball is over, and she has to go back to the dire frigid house where there is nothing to do—one of the things Gibbons gets bang right to my eye is the mad, frenzied, hopeless boredom of being a nice bourgeois girl of that era. Viola thinks: ‘I wish I was dead. Well, not exactly dead, but I wish I was a nun or something, or something simply marvellous would happen tomorrow.’

Being a nice girl, she cannot ring up Mr Charming and suggest they go to a film together; besides, he is already engaged to be married, to an extremely well-turned-out scion of the smart set. But—finally—and with only a tiny acceptable amount of violent manipulation, she has an excuse to write him a letter: ‘She posted her letters, keeping Victor’s until the end and pushing it slowly through the letter-box, letting it fall at last into the darkness. She heard the little sound as it landed on the other letters below. She stood for a minute, staring at the box, then turned and walked slowly home.’ And that letter arrives at a crucial juncture, and . . . ...more

8 likes · Like · see review

Aug 14, 2021 Elinor rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Why have I never read this book before? It concerns British life just prior to the Second World War, when people were still terribly class-conscious and unmarried women led miserable, meaningless lives. Yet the author, best known for one of my favourite books, Cold Comfort Farm, draws her characters with great charm and scathing wit. Even Tina and Viola, the women for whom we feel the most sympathy, do not escape her sardonic honesty. I actually laughed out loud a few times. The writing is lovel ...more

6 likes · Like · see review

Aug 15, 2021 Susan in NC rated it really liked it · review of another edition

4.5 stars, I really enjoyed this, read with the Retro Reads group. It was a bit slow for me for the first bit, until after the big ball - the cover and description of my copy make it seem kind of like a Cinderella retelling, with the poor, young widow (Viola) wanting to meet her handsome prince (Victor, the wealthy businessman/playboy with his own estate near her rigid in-laws). But, like life, so much more happens after the ball…

At first I was hard pressed to like any of the characters, from th ...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Sep 18, 2023 Lynnie rated it really liked it

Shelves: virago, comedy-of-manners, read-in-2023, stella-gibbons

From the opening line - "It is difficult to make a dull garden but Mr Wither had succeeded." - I knew I was going to enjoy this book. And I did, even though I didn't really like any of the characters!

Life is quite dull and not a lot happens, so when something does......

Stella Gibbons is very good at poking fun and putting her characters though hoops before they achieve their sense of happiness.

...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 10, 2010 Jodi rated it really liked it

Another fun read from Stella Gibbons. Hard to believe she wrote this in 1938--in so many ways, it seems so modern. Nightingale Wood is Gibbons' version of Cinderella with a heroine who is less than perfect ("She did not look quite a lady, which was natural; as she was not one.") and a Prince who isn't always honorable. I didn't like this novel as well as Cold Comfort Farm, the satire isn't as pronounced, but the humor is still there and I still whizzed it through it in two days. I always enjoy g ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Sep 29, 2010 Jenn Estepp rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: comfort-food, color-me-classic

while, no, it is not my beloved cold comfort farm, this bit of gibbons was just exactly the book that i needed this week and thank goodness it exists for me to sink into. it's sparkling and witty and melancholy and lovely and will sit oh, so, companionably on my shelf with that other gibbons, as well as my mitfords and dodie smith's and all the other titles that i hold close to my heart.

am i gushing? i suppose i am. now will someone please bring the other stella gibbons books out that back into ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Aug 21, 2021 Carolien rated it liked it

Shelves: 2021, classic

3.5 stars. Set in England just before the outbreak of WWII, this offers an insightful commentary of the English class system and the changes which would be accelerated by the war. Gibbons's wit shines through the story. Enjoyed it very much. ...more

Like · see review