51 Facts About Stella Gibbons

Stella Dorothea Gibbons was an English author, journalist, and poet.

Stella Gibbons established her reputation with her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, which has been reprinted many times.

The daughter of a London doctor, Gibbons had a turbulent and often unhappy childhood.

Stella Gibbons's 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.

Stella Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950.

Stella Gibbons's style has been praised by critics for its charm, barbed humour and descriptive skill, and has led to comparison with Jane Austen.

The Stella Gibbons household was a turbulent one, with tensions arising from Charles Stella Gibbons's frequent adulteries.

Telford Stella Gibbons trained as a doctor, and qualified as a physician and surgeon at the London Hospital in 1897.

Stella Gibbons, the couple's first child, was born on 5 January 1902; two brothers, Gerald and Lewis, followed in 1905 and 1909 respectively.

Stella Gibbons later described her father as "a bad man, but a good doctor".

Stella Gibbons was charitable to his poorer patients and imaginative in finding cures, but made life miserable for his family.

Until Stella Gibbons reached the age of 13 she was educated at home by a succession of governesses, who never stayed long.

In 1915 Stella Gibbons became a pupil at the North London Collegiate School, then situated in Camden Town.

Stella Gibbons shared this attitude with her contemporary Stevie Smith, the future Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry winner, who joined the school in 1917.

Stella Gibbons completed her course in the summer of 1923, and was awarded her diploma.

Stella Gibbons made her first trips abroad, travelling to France in 1924 and Switzerland in 1925.

Stella Gibbons was now the family's principal breadwinner; her youngest brother Lewis was still at school, while the elder, Gerald, was intermittently employed as an actor.

Later that year, as a result of an error involving the calculation and reporting of foreign exchange rates, Stella Gibbons was sacked from the BUP, but quickly found a new position as secretary to the editor of the London Evening Standard.

Squire persuaded Longmans to publish the first collection of Stella Gibbons's verses, entitled The Mountain Beast, which appeared in 1930 to critical approval.

The engagement had ended painfully in 1928, primarily because Stella Gibbons was looking for a fully committed relationship whereas he wanted something more open.

Stella Gibbons was not unemployed for long; she quickly accepted a job offer as an editorial assistant at the women's magazine, The Lady.

Stella Gibbons had first become familiar with the genre when she provided summaries of Webb's The Golden Arrow for the Evening Standard's 1928 serialisation.

Stella Gibbons found the writing overblown and the plotting ridiculous, and decided that her own first novel would be a comic parody of the genre.

Stella Gibbons's chosen title for her novel had been "Curse God Farm", before her friend Elizabeth Coxhead, who had connections in the Hinckley district of Leicestershire, suggested "Cold Comfort" as an alternative, using the name of a farm in the Hinckley area.

Stella Gibbons was delighted with the suggestion, and the work was published as Cold Comfort Farm in September 1932.

One critic found it hard to accept that so well-developed a parody was the work of a scarcely known woman writer, and speculated that "Stella Gibbons" was a pen-name for Evelyn Waugh.

Stella Gibbons suddenly found herself in demand in literary circles and from fellow writers, raised to a celebrity status that she found distasteful.

Stella Gibbons acquired an agent, who advised her that she could confidently expect a regular and comfortable income as a novelist.

In March 1931 Stella Gibbons had become engaged to Allan Webb, a budding actor and opera singer five years her junior.

Stella Gibbons was the son of a cricketing parson, and the grandson of Allan Becher Webb, a former Bishop of Bloemfontein who served as Dean of Salisbury Cathedral.

From November 1936 the family home was in Oakshott Avenue, on the Holly Lodge Estate off Highgate West Hill, where Stella Gibbons regularly worked in the mornings from ten until lunchtime.

Stella Gibbons's 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, to be a repetition of the earlier masterpiece.

Stella Gibbons always considered herself a serious poet rather than a comic writer.

Stella Gibbons published three novels during the war: The Rich House, Ticky and The Bachelor.

The book incorporates a comic depiction of the novelist Charles Morgan, whose novel The Fountain Stella Gibbons had reviewed before the war and found "offensive as well as wearisome".

In 1950 Stella Gibbons published her Collected Poems, and in the same year was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

From 1954, having accepted an invitation from Malcolm Muggeridge, the editor of Punch, Stella Gibbons provided frequent contributions to the magazine for the following 15 years.

Stella Gibbons, who wrote the introduction to the 1957 Heritage edition of Sense and Sensibility, was a long-time admirer of Austen, and had described her in a Lady article as "one of the most exquisite" of woman artists.

Stella Gibbons left the theatre in 1949 to become a director of a book club specialising in special editions, and later bought a bookshop in the Archway district of London.

Stella Gibbons's health failed in the late 1950s and in 1958 he was diagnosed with cancer of the liver.

Stella Gibbons likened the book to "some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but is often an embarrassment and a bore".

Stella Gibbons made her last overseas trip in 1966, to Grenoble in France where she visited her old friend Elizabeth Coxhead.

The last two decades of Stella Gibbons's life were uneventful and lived almost entirely beyond the public eye.

Stella Gibbons maintained a wide circle of friends, who in her later years included Adams, the entertainer Barry Humphries and the novelist John Braine.

Stella Gibbons died there on 19 December 1989, after collapsing the previous day, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, alongside her husband.

Stella Gibbons had what one analyst described as "a rare ability to enter into the feelings of the uncommunicative and to bring to life the emotions of the unremarkable".

Some of Stella Gibbons's poetry expressed her love of nature and a prophetic awareness for environmental issues such as sea pollution, decades before such concerns became fashionable.

Stella Gibbons did not promote herself, and was indifferent to the attractions of public life: "I'm not shy", she told Oliver, "I'm just unsociable".

Truss posits further reasons why Stella Gibbons did not become a literary canon.

Stella Gibbons considers John Betjeman and Stevie Smith as two writers who successfully achieved this.

Hammill believes that Stella Gibbons should be named alongside these two, since in her writings she rejects the stereotypical view of suburbia as unexciting, conventional and limited.