Well, I have expected to hear from Robert Poste’s child these past twenty years.Ĭhild, my father once did your father a great wrong. I’d like to cross stitch the second-to-last sentence and hang it in a frame over my front door. She is intrigued, however from this letter from the Starkadderer family, which I’m copying here in it’s entirety because it’s a pure delight to anyone who’s read a word of anything gothic. She liked everything to be tidy and pleasant and comfortable around her, and so do I…I cannot endure messes.įlora gets responses from several relatives, but none are quite satisfactory. If you ask me, I think I have much in common with Miss Austen. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, “Collecting material.” No one can object to that. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. When I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion, but with a modern setting, of course. She’s a great fan of Jane Austen, and not at all a fan of getting a job: Flora likes things to be fun and cheerful, but also tidy. In Cold Comfort Farm, our heroine, Flora, becomes an orphan and decides to sponge off of her relatives instead of getting a job. Early versions of this genre include the works of Thomas Hardy and of course Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

Widely regarded as a one-work novelist, she and her works have not been accepted into the canon of English literature-partly, other writers have suggested, because of her detachment from the literary world and her tendency to mock it.Oh, Cold Comfort Farm, where have you been all my life? This classic went completely past my radar and now that I’ve found it I’m actually surprised that it’s not dedicated to me, specifically.Ĭold Comfort Farm, published in 1932, pokes gentle fun at the sub-genre of novels that dwells on misery and melodrama on English farms. The success of Cold Comfort Farm dominated her career, and she grew to resent her identification with the book to the exclusion of the rest of her output. Her style has been praised by critics for its charm, barbed humour and descriptive skill, and has led to comparison with Jane Austen.

Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. After Cold Comfort Farm, a satire on the genre of rural-themed 'loam and lovechild' novels popular in the late 1920s, most of Gibbons's novels were based within the middle-class suburban world with which she was familiar. Her first book, published in 1930, was a collection of poems which was well received, and through her life she considered herself primarily a poet rather than a novelist. After an indifferent school career she trained as a journalist, and worked as a reporter and features writer, mainly for the Evening Standard and The Lady. The daughter of a London medical doctor, Gibbons had a turbulent and often unhappy childhood.

Novel by stella gibbons