Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons
Stella Gibbons (1902 – 1989) was an English author, journalist, and poet. She established her reputation with her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), which won the Prix Femina Étranger award. After an indifferent school career Gibbons trained as a journalist, and worked as a reporter and features writer. Her first book (1930) was a collection of poems, and throughout her life she considered herself primarily a poet rather than a novelist. After Cold Comfort Farm, a satire on the genre of rural-themed novels popular in the late 1920s, most of Gibbons's novels were based in the middle-class suburban world with which she was familiar. Critics have compared her style to Jane Austen's. Although she was active as a writer for half a century, none of her later 22 novels or other literary works achieved the same popular success, nor have they been been accepted into the canon of English literature, perhaps because of her detachment from the literary world and her tendency to mock it. Much of her work was long out of print before a modest revival in the 21st century.