Stella Gibbons of Gibbons's "most enjoyable and vicious" satirical portraits. In her introduction to the book's 2011 reprint, Lynne Truss describes it as "a rich, mature novel, romantic and wistful, full of rounded characters and terrific dialogue" that deserved more commercial success than it received. The public's expectations were still prejudiced by "Cold Comfort Farm", which by 1949 had sold 28,000 copies in hardback and 315,000 in paperback. Anticipating that a sequel would be popular, that year Gibbons produced "Conference at Cold Comfort Farm", her shortest novel, in which the farm has become a conference centre and tourist attraction. There is much
Stella Gibbons gentle powers (Pity, Affection, Time, Beauty, Laughter)" also flew in the face of a disillusioned modernism. The literary critic John Carey suggests that the abandonment by intellectuals of "the clerks and the suburbs" as subjects of literary interest provided an opening for writers prepared to exploit this underexplored area. He considers John Betjeman and Stevie Smith as two writers who successfully achieved this. Hammill believes that Gibbons should be named alongside these two, since in her writings she rejects the stereotypical view of suburbia as unexciting, conventional and limited. Instead, says Hammill, "Gibbons's fictional suburbs are socially and architecturally diverse,