Shed Sheds", which argues that a "place of retreat" is a "male necessity" which provides men with solace, especially during their retirement. In contrast, in the novel "Cold Comfort Farm" by Stella Gibbons, Aunt Ada Doom saw "something nasty in the woodshed" and retreated to her bed for half a century. To woodshed, or 'shed, in jazz jargon, is "to shut oneself up, away from the world, and practice long and hard, as in 'going to the woodshed'." The word is recorded in English since 1481, as "shadde", possibly a variant of shade. The word shade comes from the Old English
Stella Gibbons old friend Elizabeth Coxhead. This visit provided material for her 1968 novel "The Snow Woman" in which Gibbons overcame her habitual distaste for emotional excess by opening the book with a melodramatic birth on a sofa. "The Woods in Winter" (1970) was her last published novel; she decided at that point that she was no longer prepared to subject her work to editorial control. In the 1980s she wrote two more novels for private circulation among friends, "The Yellow Houses" and "An Alpha". These books – "An Alpha" retitled "Pure Juliet" – were published by Vintage Classics in 2016, after