Gibbons, Stella
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1902-1989) UK journalist and author whose best-known novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), is set in a moderately explicit Near Future, sometime after the 1946 Anglo-Nicaraguan War, when videophones and private airplanes are common. The story itself, a savagely comic Parody of epiphany-choked rural novels as written by D H Lawrence (1885-1930) and in particular Mary Webb (1881-1927) with Precious Bane (1924), uses the sf frame primarily as a distancing device. In the more broadly humorous prequel, "Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm" (in Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm and Other Stories, coll 1940), and in the less successful sequel, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1949), the sf element is further subdued – although the latter claims its period, thirteen years after the first book's events, to be "in the midst of the Second Dark Ages". Gibbons also published some supernatural fiction including the title story of Roaring Tower and Other Short Stories (coll 1937), and the sf Jane Austen pastiche "Jane in Space" (26 October 1960 Punch). [JC/DRL]
Stella Dorothea Gibbons
born London: 5 January 1902
died London: 19 December 1989
works (highly selected)
series
Cold Comfort Farm
- Cold Comfort Farm (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1932) [Cold Comfort Farm: hb/]
- Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm and Other Stories (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1940) [coll: title story only is series-linked: Cold Comfort Farm: hb/]
- Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1949) [Cold Comfort Farm: hb/]
collections
- Roaring Tower and Other Short Stories (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1937) [coll: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry