Stella Dorothea Gibbons (5 January, 1902—19 December, 1989) was an English novelist, journalist, poet and short-story writer. Her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. A satire and parody of the pessimistic ruralism of Thomas Hardy and his followers, the "loam and lovechild" genre, as some called it, Cold Comfort Farm introduces a self-confident young woman, quite self-consciously modern, pragmatic and optimistic, into the grim, fate-bound world those novelists tended to portray. Gibbons's own family was suburban and middle-class, but in some of its psychological dimensions is said to have been "not dissimilar to the Starkadders" described in that novel.[1] Her other works include "Miss Linsey and Pa" (1936), "Nightingale Wood" (1938), "Westwood" (1946), and "Conference at Cold Comfort Farm" (1959). She also worked for ten years on various newspapers, including the Evening Standard. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb, who died in 1959. They had one daughter.
External links
- Stella Gibbons - old official site, via Internet Archive, by Reggie Oliver
