Who is she? What is this book? And so you can’t buy your carpet.” Virginia WoolfīURN! But the disdain was mutual: Gibbons refused to join literary circles and cliques, knowing full well that she wasn’t making any friends for herself when she satirised their work. “I was enraged to see they gave the £40 to Gibbons still now you and Rosamond can join in blaming her. Virginia Woolf once wrote to Elizabeth Bowen, after Gibbons won a literary prize: Most people who have heard of Stella Gibbons don’t even realise that she wrote anything else.Įven in her own time, she wasn’t all that popular with her contemporaries. So, yeah, she was pretty over it, like a would-be rockstar that only ever had one hit song and was forced to play it ad infinitim for the rest of her career. To him, and his admirers, you have never grown up… The old monster has also overlain all my other books, and if I do happen to glance at him occasionally, I am filled by an incredulous wonder that I could have once been so light-hearted.” Stella Gibbons “ some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but who is often an embarrassment and a bore skipping about, and reminding you of the days when you were a bright young thing. Speaking of her first book, she once said:

Cold Comfort Farm was her first book, published in 1932, and she went on to write 23 additional novels in her lifetime but this is the only one that remains in print. Stella Gibbons seems to be the poor cousin of early 20th century authors, ignored by academics and readers alike. I certainly hadn’t before I pulled together my Keeping Up With The Penguins reading list. Now, I’m going to assume that most of you have never heard of Cold Comfort Farm either.

Author of cold comfort farm