Stella Gibbons Society of Literature in 1950. Her style has been praised by critics for its charm, barbed humour and descriptive skill, and has led to comparison with Jane Austen. The impact of "Cold Comfort Farm" dominated her career, and she grew to resent her identification with the book to the exclusion of the rest of her output. Widely regarded as a one-work novelist, she and her works have not been accepted into the canon of English literature—partly, other writers have suggested, because of her detachment from the literary world and her tendency to mock it. The Gibbons family originated in Ireland.
Stella Gibbons Stella's grandfather, Charles Preston Gibbons, was a civil engineer who spent long periods in South Africa building bridges. He and his wife Alice had six children, the second of whom—the eldest of four sons—was born in 1869 and was known by his fourth Christian name of "Telford". The Gibbons household was a turbulent one, with tensions arising from Charles Gibbons's frequent adulteries. Telford Gibbons trained as a doctor, and qualified as a physician and surgeon at the London Hospital in 1897. On 29 September 1900 he married Maude Williams, the daughter of a stockbroker. The couple bought a house in