Long Fiction:
Cold Comfort Farm, 1932
Bassett, 1934
Enbury Heath, 1935
Miss Linsey and Pa, 1936
Nightingale Wood, 1938
My American, 1939
The Rich House, 1941
Ticky, 1943
The Bachelor, 1944
Westwood: Or, The Gentle Powers, 1946
Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, 1949
The Matchmaker, 1949
The Swiss Summer, 1951
The Shadow of a Sorcerer, 1955
Here Be Dragons, 1956
White Sand and Grey Sand, 1958
A Pink Front Door, 1959
The Weather at Tregulla, 1962
The Wolves Were in the Sledge, 1964
The Charmers, 1965
Starlight, 1967
The Snow Woman, 1969
The Woods in Winter, 1970
Short Fiction:
Roaring Tower, 1937
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, 1940
Beside the Pearly Water, 1954
Poetry:
The Mountain Beast, and Other Poems, 1930
The Priestess, and Other Poems, 1934
The Lowland Venus, and Other Poems, 1938
Collected Poems, 1950
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
The Untidy Gnome, 1935
Stella Dorothea Gibbons grew up in a poor district of London, where her father was a physician. She was the eldest of three children and her family life was so unhappy that she began telling stories to help herself and her two younger brothers escape the unpleasantness of their situation. Because of her father’s ideas about education, she was taught at home by governesses until she was thirteen; then she attended the North London Collegiate School for Girls. In 1921 she entered University College, London, where she spent two years studying journalism. During the decade 1923-1933, she worked in London as a practicing journalist for British United Press, the London Evening Standard, and The Lady. She also worked seriously on poetry and fiction. In 1933 she married the British actor and singer Allan Bourne Webb, with whom she had a daughter. During the 1930’s in particular, Gibbons’s poems were widely anthologized, and her work appeared in the 1930, 1931, 1933, and 1935 editions of Best Poems, as well as in The Mercury Book of Verse (1931), Younger Poets of Today (1932), and Neo-Georgian Poetry (1937).
Gibbons’s first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, remains her best-known work, both with critics and the reading public. It was awarded the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1933, and became the basis of a 1996 film directed by John Schlesinger. The novel is a burlesque of novels about rural life, in which the novelist parodied the styles of such writers as D. H. Lawrence and T. F. Powys. Critics have noted that the writing in all of her work is workmanlike, but that the later fiction seems to be no more than merely entertaining. She was nevertheless elected a member of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Of herself, the author once declared that she took every opportunity to go to the places where ordinary people go, to gather material for her stories and novels.