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 This parody, in the newly fashionable "vers libre" style, was her first published literary work. During the next two years she contributed further poems and prose to the magazine, including "The Doer, a Story in the Russian Manner", which foreshadows her later novels in both theme and style. Gibbons completed her course in the summer of 1923, and was awarded her diploma. Gibbons's first job was with the British United Press (BUP) news agency, where she decoded overseas cables which she rewrote in presentable English. During slack periods she practised at writing articles, stories and poems. She made her first