Stella Gibbons

Stella Dorothea Gibbons 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, his followers and especially Precious Bane by Mary Webb—the "loam and lovechild" genre, as some called it—Cold Comfort Farm introduces a self-confident young woman, quite consciously modern, pragmatic, and optimistic, into the grim, fate-bound, and dark rural scene those novelists tended to portray. Gibbons was born in London, the only daughter and... eldest of three children of Telford Gibbons and his wife Maude Phoebe Standish Williams, and grew up in Kentish Town where her father, a medical doctor, had his practice. She was initially home-educated, then attended the North London Collegiate School for Girls. 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.
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