Nightingale Wood was published by Longmans, Green in 1938 — six years after Cold Comfort Farm had made Gibbons famous. It suffers from the inevitable comparison (everything Gibbons wrote after 1932 was measured against her first success and found wanting by reviewers) but is, on its own terms, a thoroughly accomplished comic novel: clever, warm, observant, and structurally satisfying.
The novel retells Cinderella — openly, without disguise — through three parallel stories set in an Essex village in the 1930s. Viola Wither is the young widow (the Cinderella), beautiful and poor, living with her dead husband’s repressive family. Saxon, a young car factory worker, is the Prince (handsome, working-class, arriving in a sports car rather than a coach). The glass slipper is replaced by a ticket stub.
But Gibbons expands the fairy tale: alongside Viola’s story run two others. Mrs. Spring, an elderly widow, pursues the local retired colonel with a determination that overrides class propriety. Tina, a young servant, seeks her own romance with practical energy. Each woman represents a different generation and class — and each achieves her romantic goal through persistence, pragmatism, and a refusal to accept the limitations society imposes.
Gibbons’s satire is gentler here than in Cold Comfort Farm: she mocks her characters’ pretensions and class anxieties with affection rather than demolition. The Essex suburban setting — neither rural Gothic nor urban sophisticated — provides a landscape of ordinary English life observed with the same precision Gibbons brought to the excesses of the Starkadders.
Collecting Nightingale Wood
First edition (Longmans, Green, London, 1938): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $50–$150
- Without jacket: $10–$25
- Signed copies: $100–$250
- Vintage Classics reissue: $5–$12
Gibbons’s most accomplished novel after Cold Comfort Farm. Recently reissued by Vintage Classics as part of the ongoing recovery of mid-century women’s fiction.