Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Gibbons, Stella

Gibbons, Stella

Cold Comfort Farm, [10] 48; Westwood, [79] 52

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20230901143006 Chris Saunders on Stella Gibbons, Westwood

Too Sharp for Her Own Good

Chris Saunders on Stella Gibbons, Westwood

Stella Gibbons is hardly a forgotten writer, but she wrote more forgotten works than almost anyone else. Her first book, Cold Comfort Farm (1940: see SF no.10), has a secure and well-deserved place in the literary pantheon – it is a funny, sharp, tender and hugely quotable novel. Nothing else she wrote equalled its popularity, even the sequels, and by the turn of the millennium it was pretty much the only Gibbons book, out of twenty-five novels, three collections of short stories and four volumes of poems, left in print.
20060601150929 ‘Something nasty in the woodshed’ by Mark Handley: Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

Poste-Freudian Therapy

Michele Hanson on Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

It is generally thought that Stella Gibbons was mocking Mary Webb’s Precious Bane when she wrote Cold Comfort Farm, but she was probably having a pop at all those purveyors of country hardship, sex, doom and slop, Hardy and Lawrence included. One can easily tire of the lush, dripping, thrusting, tragic, moist, fecund countryside, and long for a brisk young woman from the tough pavements of town like Flora Poste to come along and tidy things up a bit . . .

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