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Gibbons, Stella

Entry updated 21 October 2024. Tagged: Author.

(1902-1989) UK journalist, poet and author, active from the early 1920s. Perhaps unfairly, she remains known almost exclusively for her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), set in a moderately explicit Near Future, sometime after the 1946 Anglo-Nicaraguan War, when public 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". As hinted by the title, Conference depicts the Farm after it has been turned into a conference centre and needs some re-injection of rusticity; the Satire is direct, though the language has lost some of its bite.

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

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Cold Comfort Farm

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