Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm while working for on the books pages of the Lady. Or, indeed, the brisk way (with one, two or three asterisks) in which she humorously drew attention to the best bits in her narrative. Part of its immediate success was probably also due to the merciless contempt in which the young Gibbons (she was barely 30) held many generations of romantic/pastoral fiction. But she continues to be remembered, and in some quarters revered, for just one title, a jeu d’esprit that’s a brilliant parody of an inter-war genre of provincial, rural melodrama typified (at the high end) by DH Lawrence and, much lower down, by Mary Webb, author of titles such as Precious Bane and The Golden Arrow.
S tella Gibbons, who was born in the same year as Georgette Heyer and Stevie Smith, 1902, wrote more than 20 novels, and thought of herself as a poet.
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