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,
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