She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Among her works are Nightingale Wood (1938), The Bachelor (1944), Westwood (1946), and Starlight (1967). Her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) was an immediate success and won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry.

She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. When a well-educated young socialite in 1930s England is left orphaned and unable to support herself at age twenty-two, she moves in with her eccentric relatives on their farm.Ībout the Author: Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. A hilarious and merciless parody of rural melodramas, Cold Comfort Farm (1932) is one of the best-loved comic novels of all time.

Armed with common sense and a strong will, she resolves to take each of the family in hand. But Flora loves nothing better than to organize other people. At the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm, she meets the doomed Starkadders- cousin Judith, heaving with remorse for unspoken wickedness Amos, preaching fire and damnation their sons, lustful Seth and despairing Reuben child of nature, Elfine and crazed old Aunt Ada Doom, who has kept to her bedroom for the last twenty years. When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex. Stella Gibbons' hilarious comic novel of rural life, new to Penguin Modern Classics Cold Comfort Farm has a foreword addressed to Anthony Pookworthy, Esq ABS, LLR, an overrated, smug, self-congratulatory literary establishment figure invented by Gibbons.

Author of cold comfort farm