Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm

Cold Comfort Farm was published in 1932 and its success was immediate (although it was banned in the Irish Free State because of its endorsement of contraception) and long-lived; its legacy over-shadowed all of her other writing while Gibbons was alive and after her death. In 1966 she wrote:

Cold Comfort Farm is a member of my family; he is like some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but who is often an embarrassment and a bore.

It is a novel that, amongst other things, satirises the somewhat overwrought works of authors such as Mary Webb, whose writing Gibbons encountered whilst working at the Standard.

In 1934 Stella Gibbons accepted the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse at the Institut Français in London for Cold Comfort Farm. She received £40 and the opprobrium of the previously complimentary Virginia Woolf (who had a friend who was also vying for the award): "I was enraged to see they gave the £40 to Gibbons.... Who is she? What is this book?"

Sequels to the book, published in 1940 and 1949, "did not have the same topicality or literary astringency as the original," nor the same popularity.