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 secretary to the editor of the London "Evening Standard". Within a short time she was promoted, and became a reporter and features writer at the then substantial salary of just under £500 a year, although she was not given a by-line until 1928. During her "Evening Standard" years, Gibbons persevered with poetry, and in September 1927 her poem "The Giraffes" appeared in "The Criterion", a literary magazine edited by T. S. Eliot. This work was read and admired by Virginia Woolf, who enquired if Gibbons would write poems for the Woolf publishing house, the Hogarth Press. In January 1928 ,