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
Stella Gibbons depictions of country life; Webb was a favourite of the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Gibbons had first become familiar with the genre when she provided summaries of Webb's "The Golden Arrow" for the "Evening Standard's" 1928 serialisation. She found the writing overblown and the plotting ridiculous, and decided that her own first novel would be a comic parody of the genre. By February 1932 she had completed the manuscript and delivered it to her publishers, Longmans. Gibbons's chosen title for her novel had been "Curse God Farm", before her friend Elizabeth Coxhead, who had connections in the Hinckley district