Stella Gibbons unhappy childhood. After an indifferent school career she trained as a journalist, and worked as a reporter and features writer, mainly for the "Evening Standard" and "The Lady". Her first book, published in 1930, was a collection of poems which was well received, and through her life she considered herself primarily a poet rather than a novelist. After "Cold Comfort Farm", a satire on the genre of rural-themed "loam and lovechild" novels popular in the late 1920s, most of Gibbons's novels were based within the middle-class suburban world with which she was familiar. Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal
Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp of Nina's Aunt Nesbit), and Tomtit, a joker-type character. There is also a family of poor whites, who have but a single, devoted slave, Old Tiff. Dred, the titular character, is one of the Great Dismal Swamp maroons, escaped slaves living in the Great Dismal Swamp, preaching angry and violent retribution for the evils of slavery and rescuing escapees from the dog of the slavecatchers. The response to Stowe's first work greatly impacted her second anti-slavery novel. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" drew criticism from abolitionists and African-American authors for the passive martyrdom of Uncle Tom and endorsement of colonization as the