Cold comfort for Gibbons fans

One of the great fascinations of a ‘lost’ work by a famous name dredged up out of the vault after a lapse of several decades lies in establishing precisely when it was written. The jacket of Pure Juliet offers no clue, but parenthetic mention of Star Wars being on at the Odeon and an old lady who fears the depredations of the IRA suggests a composition mark sometime in the late 1970s — at any rate somewhere near the point when Stella Gibbons (1902–1989) was approaching her 80th year.

Take away these half-dozen references to such sure-fire signifiers of the Callaghan era as comprehensive schools and this awful ‘punk’ music and what remains could very easily have been filed in the 1930s. Certainly most of the dialogue — in which old ladies bellow ‘What?’ at their nervous interlocutors, thirtysomethings proclaim that they’ll be damned and a girl tells her fiancé that he’s an ass — is well-nigh archaic, as are the demographic boundaries of a cast in which elderly spinsters, breezy young men and domestic servants genteelly abound.

Not all, though, is well-manicured politesse, because Juliet, Gibbons’s chain-smoking and obstreperous heroine, hails from a council estate and talks panto-style London demotic. A self-taught scientific genius, enticed by her ageing benefactress Miss Adelaide Pennecuick into taking up residence in a large and suspiciously well-staffed house in Hertfordshire, ‘Julie’ awakens all kinds of alarm in the breasts of Miss Pennecuick’s entourage, not least her fast friend Mrs Massey, who worries that a proposal by ‘Addy’s great-nephew Frank will cut out her grand-daughter Clemence’. Then, of course, there is the question of where the money will end up.

If all this sounds like the plot of a Victorian novel transported into the modern age, or something more or less approximating it, then the resemblance becomes even more emphatic in the chapters following Miss Pennecuick’s death.