Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons (London, 1902 – 1989) was an English novelist, journalist and poet. She is remembered almost entirely for one book, Cold Comfort Farm, although she wrote steadily for more than fifty years. Her career shows how a single early success can overshadow everything that follows.

The daughter of a London doctor, she grew up in a household marked by her father's violent temper and heavy drinking. She attended the North London Collegiate School and then trained as a journalist at University College London. She worked as a reporter for the British United Press, the Evening Standard and The Lady, yet she always thought of herself as a poet first. Her first book, The Mountain Beast (1930), a collection of verse, was well received.

Cold Comfort Farm (1932) mocked the gloomy rural novels fashionable in the late 1920s, with writers such as Mary Webb, Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence as its targets. The book was an immediate success, won the Femina Prize in 1934 and has been reprinted many times. Most of her later novels, set in middle-class suburbia, failed to match it, and she came to resent being known for that one title.

Critics praised her charm, barbed humour and descriptive skill, and compared her with Jane Austen. Still, she has not entered the canon of English literature. Some writers have linked this to her detachment from the literary world and her habit of mocking it. Her legacy rests mainly on that first novel, which continues to be reissued.