Stella Gibbons more novels, as well as two poetry collections, a children's book, and a number of short stories. From November 1936 the family home was in Oakshott Avenue, on the Holly Lodge Estate off Highgate West Hill, where Gibbons regularly worked in the mornings from ten until lunchtime. Her novels were generally well received by critics and the public, though none earned the accolades or attention that had been given to "Cold Comfort Farm"; readers of "The Times" were specifically warned not to expect Gibbons's second novel, "Bassett" (1934), to be a repetition of the earlier masterpiece. "Enbury Heath" (1935) is
Stella Gibbons in her prose might, according to Gibbons's "Guardian" obituarist Richard Boston, be a reaction against the turbulent and sometimes violent emotions that she witnessed within her own family who, she said, "were all madly highly-sexed, like the Starkadders". It is, observed Neville, an irony that the overheated melodrama that Gibbons most disliked was at the heart of her one great success; Gibbons's writings on everyday life brought her restrained approval, but no noticeable literary recognition. Nevertheless, her straightforward, style, unadorned except in parody, is admired by Rachel Cooke, who praises her as "a sworn enemy of the flatulent, the pompous