Stella Gibbons "Cold Comfort Farm"; it mentions none of her other works—while providing her "bêtes noires" Morgan and Mary Webb with full entries. To Gibbons, "Cold Comfort Farm" became "That Book" or "You-Know-What", its title never mentioned. Despite her growing irritation and expressed distaste for it, the book continued to be lauded by successive generations of critics, Boston described it as "one of those rare books of comic genius that imprints itself on the brain and can never afterwards be eradicated". A more negative view of the book has been expressed by the literary critic Mary Beard, who considers it "a rather
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle book". (Whether they do indeed die is disputed by critics, as the author says "if our time-racked flat-lying couple ever intended to die".) Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov published in 1969. "Ada" began to materialize in 1959, when Nabokov was flirting with two projects, "The Texture of Time" and "Letters from Terra". In 1965, he began to see a link between the two ideas, finally composing a unified novel from February 1966 to October 1968. The published cumulation would become his longest work. "Ada" was initially given