Stella Gibbons full-time writing career. In March 1931 Gibbons had become engaged to Allan Webb, a budding actor and opera singer five years her junior. He 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. On 1 April 1933 the couple were married at St Matthew's, Bayswater. Later that year she learned that "Cold Comfort Farm" had been awarded the "Prix Étranger", the foreign novel category of the prestigious French literary prize, the "Prix Femina". It had won against works by two more experienced writers,
Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp of Nina's Aunt Nesbit), and Tomtit, a joker-type character. There is also a family of poor whites, who have but a single, devoted slave, Old Tiff. Dred, the titular character, is one of the Great Dismal Swamp maroons, escaped slaves living in the Great Dismal Swamp, preaching angry and violent retribution for the evils of slavery and rescuing escapees from the dog of the slavecatchers. The response to Stowe's first work greatly impacted her second anti-slavery novel. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" drew criticism from abolitionists and African-American authors for the passive martyrdom of Uncle Tom and endorsement of colonization as the