Stella Gibbons Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann. This outcome irritated Virginia Woolf, herself a former "Prix Étranger" winner, who wrote to Bowen: "I was enraged to see they gave the £40 (the cash value of the prize) to Gibbons; still, now you and Rosamond can join in blaming her". Cooke observes that of all the "Prix Étranger" winners from the inter-war years, only "Cold Comfort Farm" and Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" are remembered today, and that only the former has bequeathed a phrase that has passed into common usage: "something nasty in the woodshed". During the remainder of the 1930s Gibbons produced five
Stella Gibbons Oakshott Avenue at which, according to Neville, "she was known to expel guests if they were shrill, dramatic, or wrote tragic novels." As her own productivity dwindled and finally ceased altogether, she kept a commonplace book in which she was recording her thoughts and opinions on literature as late as 1988. From the mid-1980s Gibbons experienced recurrent health problems, not helped when she resumed smoking. In her last months she was looked after at home by her grandson and his girlfriend. She died there on 19 December 1989, after collapsing the previous day, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, alongside