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 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