Stella Gibbons even visit literary squares, or love in literary triangles". Truss posits further reasons why Gibbons did not become a literary canon. Because she was a woman who wrote amusingly, she was classified as "middlebrow"; furthermore, she was published by Longmans, a non-literary publisher. Her lampooning of the literary establishment in the spoof dedication of "Cold Comfort Farm" to one "Anthony Pookworthy" did not amuse that establishment, who were further offended by the book's mockery of the writing of such canonical figures as Lawrence and Hardy—hence Virginia Woolf's reaction to the "Prix Étranger" award. Her belief in what she called "the
Stella Gibbons died from heart disease aggravated by heavy drinking. Gibbons was now the family's principal breadwinner; her youngest brother Lewis was still at school, while the elder, Gerald, was intermittently employed as an actor. The three set up home in a cottage on the Vale of Health, a small settlement in the middle of Hampstead Heath, with literary connections to Keats (whom Gibbons revered), Leigh Hunt and D. H. Lawrence. Later that year, as a result of an error involving the calculation and reporting of foreign exchange rates, Gibbons was sacked from the BUP, but quickly found a new position as