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 a relatively faithful account of her childhood and early adult life with, according to Oliver, "only the thinnest veil of fictional gauze cover[ing] raw experience". "Miss Linsey and Pa" (1936) was thought by Nicola Beauman, in her analysis of women writers from 1914 to 1939, to parody Radclyffe Hall's 1928 lesbian novel "The Well of Loneliness". Gibbons's final prewar novels were "Nightingale Wood" (1935)—"Cinderella brought right up to date"—and "My American" (1939), which Oliver considers her most escapist novel, "a variant of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen"." Gibbons always considered herself a serious poet rather than a comic writer.