Stella Gibbons detestation of pomposity and pretence. Truss has described Gibbons as "the Jane Austen of the 20th century", a parallel which the novelist Malcolm Bradbury thought apt; Flora Poste in "Cold Comfort Farm", with her "higher common sense", is "a Jane-ite heroine transformed into a clear-eyed modern woman". Bradbury also observed that many of Gibbons's novels end in Austen-like nuptials. Truss highlights the importance that Gibbons places on detachment as a necessary adjunct to effective writing: "Like many a good doctor, she seems to have considered sympathy a peculiar and redundant emotion, and a terrible waste of time." This matter-of-fact quality
Ada Lovelace person to see the potential of the analytical engine as a machine capable of expressing entities other than quantities. Lovelace has been portrayed in Romulus Linney's 1977 play "Childe Byron", the 1990 steampunk novel "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, the 1997 film "Conceiving Ada", and in John Crowley's 2005 novel "Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land", where she is featured as an unseen character whose personality is forcefully depicted in her annotations and anti-heroic efforts to archive her father's lost novel. In Tom Stoppard's 1993 play "Arcadia", the precocious teenage genius Thomasina Coverly (a character "apparently