Stella Gibbons unhappy childhood. After an indifferent school career she trained as a journalist, and worked as a reporter and features writer, mainly for the "Evening Standard" and "The Lady". Her first book, published in 1930, was a collection of poems which was well received, and through her life she considered herself primarily a poet rather than a novelist. After "Cold Comfort Farm", a satire on the genre of rural-themed "loam and lovechild" novels popular in the late 1920s, most of Gibbons's novels were based within the middle-class suburban world with which she was familiar. Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal
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