ROBINSON CRUSOE is a lockdown story, as are most Golden Age detective novels, set in remote country houses: Jane Eyre and Rogue Male, but Stella Gibbons, wrote the lockdown story for our age.
Born in 1902, she was the eldest of three children whose father, a London GP, drank too much and played away. Stella escaped by taking a diploma course designed to ease demobbed soldiers into journalism. When her parents died she was left, aged 24, to look after her younger brothers; she moved them to Hampstead and turned out articles at The Lady where, in a small back room, she wrote a novel that made the office typists fall about laughing.
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