Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons (5 January 1902 – 19 December 1989) was an English novelist and poet who wrote one of the finest comic novels of the twentieth century — Cold Comfort Farm (1932) — and then spent the rest of her career in the shadow of that single, devastating achievement. The novel parodied the rural fiction of Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith, and the “loam and lovechild” school with such precision that it effectively killed the genre it mocked, and it has remained continuously in print while the earnest novels it satirised have been largely forgotten.

Life

Gibbons was born in Kentish Town, London, the eldest of three children. Her father was a doctor with a violent temper; her childhood was unhappy, and the household chaotic — material she would later transmute into her understanding of how absurd domestic tyrannies operate. She attended University College London, studied journalism, and worked as a reporter for various London papers, including the Evening Standard, where she served as a drama and literary critic.

She married Allan Bourne Webb, an actor and singer, in 1933 — the year after Cold Comfort Farm was published. The marriage was stable and quiet; Gibbons lived a deliberately private, uneventful life in Highgate, London, for the rest of her days, writing steadily and resisting the literary social scene.

Cold Comfort Farm (1932)

Flora Poste, a sensible, well-educated young woman orphaned at twenty, goes to live with her relatives, the Starkadders, at the grim farmstead of Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex. The Starkadders are a gallery of rural Gothic grotesques: Aunt Ada Doom, who “saw something nasty in the woodshed” and has used this trauma to tyrannise the family for decades; Seth, the smouldering stable hand; Reuben, who wants the farm; Elfine, the wild romantic who runs barefoot over the downs; Amos, the fire-and-brimstone preacher.

Flora, armed with common sense, good taste, and a copy of The Higher Common Sense by the Abbé Fausse-Repas, proceeds to sort out every one of them — finding Seth a career in Hollywood, civilising Elfine, sending Aunt Ada Doom on a world cruise, and generally imposing rational order on passionate chaos.

The novel’s comic genius lies in the gap between Flora’s brisk Austen-like sensibility and the Brontë/Hardy/Lawrence world she invades. Gibbons marked the purplest passages with one, two, or three asterisks — a device borrowed from travel guides — to signal the precise degree of overwrought prose being parodied. The novel won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse in 1933, beating entries by, among others, Virginia Woolf.

Other Fiction

Gibbons wrote twenty-four further novels, none of which achieved the fame of Cold Comfort Farm — a fact that clearly frustrated her. Several are quietly excellent. Nightingale Wood (1938) is a fairy-tale-inflected comedy of class and romance. Westwood (1946) is a wartime novel of observation, Gibbons’s own favourite among her books. The Matchmaker (1949) revisits the comic territory of Cold Comfort Farm with a gentler touch. The Bachelor (1954) is a sharp study of male self-deception.

She also wrote short stories — including the delightful Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940) and Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1949) — and several volumes of poetry that critics found surprisingly accomplished, if minor.

Critical Standing

Gibbons has always been the victim of her own best joke. Cold Comfort Farm is so brilliantly funny that it made everything else she wrote seem disappointing by comparison — not because the other novels are bad, but because Cold Comfort Farm is almost impossibly good. The critical establishment largely ignored her after the 1930s; she was not taken up by feminist critics until quite late, and she never achieved the institutional recognition that her contemporaries (Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen) received.

In recent decades her reputation has stabilised: Cold Comfort Farm is now a set text, a 1995 BBC adaptation with Kate Beckinsale and Eileen Atkins introduced it to a new audience, and her other novels are gradually being reprinted and reassessed.

Collecting Gibbons

Cold Comfort Farm (1932, Longmans) in first edition with dust jacket is a genuinely rare book — one of the most sought-after comic novels of the period, bringing $3,000–$8,000 in fine condition with jacket. Without the jacket, copies bring $200–$500. First editions of her later novels are modestly priced ($30–$100), representing excellent value for collectors who appreciate the full range of her work. The short story collections, particularly Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, are charming and undervalued.