Stella Gibbons even visit literary squares, or love in literary triangles". Truss posits further reasons why Gibbons did not become a literary canon. Because she was a woman who wrote amusingly, she was classified as "middlebrow"; furthermore, she was published by Longmans, a non-literary publisher. Her lampooning of the literary establishment in the spoof dedication of "Cold Comfort Farm" to one "Anthony Pookworthy" did not amuse that establishment, who were further offended by the book's mockery of the writing of such canonical figures as Lawrence and Hardy—hence Virginia Woolf's reaction to the "Prix Étranger" award. Her belief in what she called "the
By the Pricking of My Thumbs first novels in the 1920s to the last in the 1970s. They were youthful in two Christie books written in the 1920s, middle-aged in a World War II spy novel, and elderly in this work. The title of the book comes from Act 4, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth", when the second witch says: By the pricking of my thumbs,<br>Something wicked this way comes. The novel is divided into four books. In Book 1 Tommy and Tuppence Beresford visit Tommy’s aunt Ada in a retirement home called Sunny Ridge. While Tommy talks with his aunt, Tuppence has a conversation