Stella Gibbons Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann. This outcome irritated Virginia Woolf, herself a former "Prix Étranger" winner, who wrote to Bowen: "I was enraged to see they gave the £40 (the cash value of the prize) to Gibbons; still, now you and Rosamond can join in blaming her". Cooke observes that of all the "Prix Étranger" winners from the inter-war years, only "Cold Comfort Farm" and Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" are remembered today, and that only the former has bequeathed a phrase that has passed into common usage: "something nasty in the woodshed". During the remainder of the 1930s Gibbons produced five
Stella Gibbons Second World War was perhaps the wrong time to satirise ... the ridiculous and dangerous rituals that surround the male aggressive instinct". "The Bachelor" won critical praise for its revealing account of life in war-torn Britain—as did several of Gibbons's postwar novels. Gibbons's first postwar novel was "Westwood" (1946). The book incorporates a comic depiction of the novelist Charles Morgan, whose novel "The Fountain" Gibbons had reviewed before the war and found "offensive as well as wearisome". In "Westwood", Morgan appears in the guise of the novelist "Gerald Challis", a pompous, humourless bore. Oliver considers this characterisation to be one