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
Mavis Cheek Arnold Bennett, Stella Gibbons, William Boyd and Beryl Bainbridge as "literary heroes". For "A Good Read" on the BBC Radio 4 programme of that name broadcast on 7 June 2011 she chose "Micka" by Frances Kay. Her own novel, "Janice Gentle Gets Sexy", was chosen for A Good Read in its year of paperback publication, 1994. "The Sex Life of My Aunt" (2002), her tenth novel, draws liberally on her own background and childhood, including something of her family uneasy relationships. There are strong autobiographical elements also in her twelfth novel, "Yesterday's Houses" (2006), about the beginning of a woman's