Slightly Less Beloved Classics takes a second look at the lesser-known works of celebrated authors. Here we shall decide what is to remain by the wayside and what is to be led gaily back home, lauded with timbrels and trumpets and fatted calves. This first installment concerns English novelist Stella Gibbons and the insufficiently famous Nightingale Wood. Stella Gibbons, if she is remembered now at all, is best known for the admittedly delightful Cold Comfort Farm (later made into an equally delightful film in 1995 with Kate Beckinsale and the bad guy from A Knight's Tale), her satirical 1932 novel about the tragedies of rural English life, where Thomas Hardy and the Brontë sisters get it in equal measure.If you are a particular type of bookish woman--reflective without being sentimental, easily drawn out but rarely forward--this is the kind of book you read often and deeply cherish. You know about what Aunt Ada Doom saw in the woodshed. You may very well long for your own cletterin' brush. But Stella Gibbons did not lay down her pen in 1932, content to skewer ANGUISH ON THE MOORS but the once, and write nevermore. She wrote more than twenty additional novels, the best of which may very well be Nightingale Wood.It is more than a bit like the Cinderella story. There's an orphan of sorts, and a prince, although the stepsisters are more prosaic and self-centered than cruel. They have their own adventures to worry about. Sophie Dahl, in the introduction to the 2008 edition, writes that "Prince Charming is charming, yes, but he's also a little dull, vulgar and complacent. Cinderella is beautiful and true, yet a tad apathetic. Also, there are multiple garden parties, an excellent addition to any novel.
