Stella Gibbons unhappy childhood. After an indifferent school career she trained as a journalist, and worked as a reporter and features writer, mainly for the "Evening Standard" and "The Lady". Her 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. After "Cold Comfort Farm", a satire on the genre of rural-themed "loam and lovechild" novels popular in the late 1920s, most of Gibbons's novels were based within the middle-class suburban world with which she was familiar. Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal
By the Pricking of My Thumbs first novels in the 1920s to the last in the 1970s. They were youthful in two Christie books written in the 1920s, middle-aged in a World War II spy novel, and elderly in this work. The title of the book comes from Act 4, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth", when the second witch says: By the pricking of my thumbs,<br>Something wicked this way comes. The novel is divided into four books. In Book 1 Tommy and Tuppence Beresford visit Tommy’s aunt Ada in a retirement home called Sunny Ridge. While Tommy talks with his aunt, Tuppence has a conversation