Stella Gibbons "Cold Comfort Farm"; it mentions none of her other works—while providing her "bêtes noires" Morgan and Mary Webb with full entries. To Gibbons, "Cold Comfort Farm" became "That Book" or "You-Know-What", its title never mentioned. Despite her growing irritation and expressed distaste for it, the book continued to be lauded by successive generations of critics, Boston described it as "one of those rare books of comic genius that imprints itself on the brain and can never afterwards be eradicated". A more negative view of the book has been expressed by the literary critic Mary Beard, who considers it "a rather
Ada Lovelace person to see the potential of the analytical engine as a machine capable of expressing entities other than quantities. Lovelace has been portrayed in Romulus Linney's 1977 play "Childe Byron", the 1990 steampunk novel "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, the 1997 film "Conceiving Ada", and in John Crowley's 2005 novel "Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land", where she is featured as an unseen character whose personality is forcefully depicted in her annotations and anti-heroic efforts to archive her father's lost novel. In Tom Stoppard's 1993 play "Arcadia", the precocious teenage genius Thomasina Coverly (a character "apparently