page_title: Stella Gibbons
section_title: 1930s
hierarchical_section_title: Stella Gibbons / Life / Established author / 1930s
caption_attribution_description: English: Holly Lodge Estate This estate of mock tudor houses is built on the site of Holly Lodge, the former grand residence of the Burdett-Coutts family. It is situated opposite Highgate cemetery.
context_page_description: Stella Dorothea Gibbons was an English author, journalist, and poet. She established her reputation with her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm which has been reprinted many times. Although she was active as a writer for half a century, none of her later 22 novels or other literary works—which included a sequel to Cold Comfort Farm—achieved the same critical or popular success. Much of her work was long out of print before a modest revival in the 21st century.
  The daughter of a London doctor, Gibbons had a turbulent and often unhappy childhood. After an indifferent school career she trained as a journalist, and worked as a reporter and features writer, mainly for the Evening Standard and The Lady. Her first book, published in 1930, was a collection of poems which was well received, and through her life she considered herself primarily a poet rather than a novelist. After Cold Comfort Farm, a satire on the genre of rural-themed "loam and lovechild" novels popular in the late 1920s, most of Gibbons's novels were based within the middle-class suburban world with which she was familiar.
  Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950.
context_section_description: During the remainder of the 1930s Gibbons  produced five more novels, as well as two poetry collections, a children's book, and a number of short stories. From November 1936 the family home was in Oakshott Avenue, on the Holly Lodge Estate off Highgate West Hill, where Gibbons regularly worked in the mornings from ten until lunchtime.  Her novels were generally well received by critics and the public, though none earned the accolades or attention that had been given to Cold Comfort Farm;  readers of The Times were specifically warned not to expect Gibbons's second novel,  Bassett (1934), to be a repetition of the earlier masterpiece. Enbury Heath (1935) is a relatively faithful account of her childhood and early adult life with, according to Oliver, "only the thinnest veil of fictional gauze cover[ing] raw experience". Miss Linsey and Pa (1936) was thought by Nicola Beauman, in her analysis of women writers from 1914 to 1939, to parody Radclyffe Hall's  1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Gibbons's final prewar novels were  Nightingale Wood (1935)—"Cinderella brought right up to date"—and My American (1939), which Oliver considers her most escapist novel, "a variant of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen."
  Gibbons always considered herself a serious poet rather than a comic writer. She published two collections of poetry in the 1930s, the latter of which, The Lowland Verses (1938) contains "The Marriage of the Machine", an early lament on the effects of industrial pollution: "What oil, what poison lulls/Your wings and webs, my cormorants and gulls?" Gibbons's single children's book was the fairy tale collection The Untidy Gnome, published in 1935 and dedicated to her only child Laura, who was born that year.
caption: Mock Tudor houses on the Holly Lodge Estate, Highgate, where Gibbons lived from 1936 (2008 photograph)
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