Westwood (Vintage Classics)
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Westwood (Vintage Classics) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Book Description
A delightful tale of wartime romance and friendship
Product Description
Set in wartime Highgate, 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'. What she lacks for in looks she makes up for with a romantic nature and cultural aspirations - she goes to concerts at the National Gallery and is a devotee of the modern drama. By contrast, Margaret's best friend Hilda has a sunny temperament and effortlessly attractive. Hilda's many "boys" are always "ever so cheery".
When Margaret finds a ration book in Hampstead Heath the playwright Gerard Challis enters both their lives. Challis is delighted with his own work and lines such as, 'Suffering is the anvil upon which the crystal sword of integrity is hammered'. He has no use for humour, 'he had more than once publicly and severely put it in its place (where, with Shakespeare and Jane Austen, it stayed).' Margaret slavishly adores Challis and his artistic circle; Challis idolises Hilda for her hair, her eyes and Hilda find's Gerard's romantic overtures a bit of a bind.
This is a delightfully wistful tale of romantic entanglements and self-reliance
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Hurrah for Vintage! I've been methodically tracking down Stella Gibbons's novels for years, finding them in library stacks and in second hand bookshops, and now, at long last, here are some of her most scintillating novels back in print with great new covers. 'Westwood' contains some of her sharpest, most satirical writing, and even if her main target i.e the pretentious playwright and writer, Charles Morgan, disguised here as Challis, may not be familiar to modern readers, this hardly matters, as he has many successors in the literary world of today. The opening of the book, evoking Hampstead Heath in war-time, is one of the best passages Stella Gibbons ever wrote, and her sly humour fills every page.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is the first Stella Gibbons novel I read (just this year) and I'm really thankful to Vintage (as are many other readers I've found) for reprinting these books. No wonder the rarer titles seem to have sold out so quickly on Amazon.
Gibbons is wonderfully observant and her characters are particularly well-drawn, and you get a really evocative sense of place from every setting she describes. She also has a knack for dialogue - often you can imagine it on a cinema screen with a few old school British character actors and actresses, such as Margaret's young Diana Dors-ish sounding best friend.
Compared to the earliest novels this one has real maturity and a greater depth - witty and sharply perceptive, wonderfully unaffected, but with a darker undertow in the portrait of the central character's entrapment in 40s suburbia and her dreams of escape to the arts world of the Hampstead (or thereabouts) chattering classes. There's some dirty realism here amid the lightness of touch and at times you can even feel you're reading something as contemporary as Douglas Coupland or Rachel Cusk in the way she logs quirky detail or pops the bubbles of her characters' self-image.
Gibbons is wonderfully observant and her characters are particularly well-drawn, and you get a really evocative sense of place from every setting she describes. She also has a knack for dialogue - often you can imagine it on a cinema screen with a few old school British character actors and actresses, such as Margaret's young Diana Dors-ish sounding best friend.
Compared to the earliest novels this one has real maturity and a greater depth - witty and sharply perceptive, wonderfully unaffected, but with a darker undertow in the portrait of the central character's entrapment in 40s suburbia and her dreams of escape to the arts world of the Hampstead (or thereabouts) chattering classes. There's some dirty realism here amid the lightness of touch and at times you can even feel you're reading something as contemporary as Douglas Coupland or Rachel Cusk in the way she logs quirky detail or pops the bubbles of her characters' self-image.
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Margaret the dreamy heroine along with her practical pal Hilda are growing up in war time London.They both get involved with the highbrow and closeted Challis family but things do not go according to plan.....
There is drama and atmosphere in this sensitive wistful novel about a young girls dreams and aspirations.I agree with another reviewer that many of the characters are not likeable or pleasant but even Jane Austen created similar heroines that you could shake sometimes...The miserable misfit German girl in the book who latches on to Margaret and cherishes her friendship is a good depiction of loneliness during the war.We urge our heroine to strike out and not to accept second best in life....
I would like to have had much more about Hilda who is lighter and outgoing.
There is drama and atmosphere in this sensitive wistful novel about a young girls dreams and aspirations.I agree with another reviewer that many of the characters are not likeable or pleasant but even Jane Austen created similar heroines that you could shake sometimes...The miserable misfit German girl in the book who latches on to Margaret and cherishes her friendship is a good depiction of loneliness during the war.We urge our heroine to strike out and not to accept second best in life....
I would like to have had much more about Hilda who is lighter and outgoing.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
A curio, little more
"If Cold Comfort Farm is Stella Gibbon's Pride and Prejudice, then Westwood is her Persuasion," says Lynne Truss, in her introduction. The observation is acute. Read more
Published 29 days ago by DJJ
Westwood
I was a bit disappointed with this book. For an acclaimed author I felt the standard of some of the writing was quite juvenile, though there were also some excellent descriptive... Read more
Published 5 months ago by PamD
woeful
Cold Comfort Farm is one of my all time favourite books. I was aware that Stella Gibbons had written many other novels, and that most of them were out of print. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Mrs. K. A. Wheatley
A fascinating read
This is a sadly neglected classic and wonderfully evocative of a long lost era. Sound characterisation and very poetic in parts as well as gently satirical. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Gilly Fraser
Westwood by Stella Gibbons
Interesting read - facets of life so different in many ways, and yet the emotions and machinations of the human mind so very much the same as they ever were and ever will be. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Wells Weaver
Disappointing
I was looking forward to this book, having loved 'Cold Comfort Farm', but really struggled with it. As a previous reviewer said, all the characters seemed unattractive and... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Scribbler
Wartime? Who would have guessed!
OK, there are servicemen around, including GIs & the odd bomb does fall in Norrh London in the story, but apart from that the main story of the novel could have been set in almost... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Gorilla
Am I Missing Something?
I keep reading reviews of this book, saying how delightful and charming it is. Well, I found it pretty depressing. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Mrs. Trudie A. Bamford
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
