The Yellow Houses

The Yellow Houses

Summary

Wilfred Davis, quiet, retired, respectable widower, is sitting and sobbing on a park bench. He has lost his daughter and any sense of purpose. A mysterious stranger passes him a handkerchief, and strikes up a conversation that leads to friendship and an unconventional new home for Wilfred.

Mary Davis wants only four things out of life: a husband and three children, so at seventeen she runs away from school, her father and her home and moves to London to find them. Only a few months later Mary is engaged, but love and marriage promise to be very different from her childhood daydreams.

For Mary and Wilfred, it seems Fate has taken a hand, or is there another kind of guiding spirit at play?

Stella Gibbons' final novel, written in the 1970s but only discovered many years after her death, is published here for the first time.

Reviews

  • Fans of the acclaimed British author, described as the “Jane Austen of the 20th century” will be delighted that the existence of two never-before-published novels have been revealed by her daughter
    Independent

About the author

Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) was an immediate success and won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Among her works are Nightingale Wood (1938), The Bachelor (1944), Westwood (1946), and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.
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