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 Second World War was perhaps the wrong time to satirise ... the ridiculous and dangerous rituals that surround the male aggressive instinct". "The Bachelor" won critical praise for its revealing account of life in war-torn Britain—as did several of Gibbons's postwar novels. Gibbons's first postwar novel was "Westwood" (1946). The book incorporates a comic depiction of the novelist Charles Morgan, whose novel "The Fountain" Gibbons had reviewed before the war and found "offensive as well as wearisome". In "Westwood", Morgan appears in the guise of the novelist "Gerald Challis", a pompous, humourless bore. Oliver considers this characterisation to be one