Stella Gibbons many years, when in 1965 she contributed an essay to "Light on C.S. Lewis", a review of that writer's work edited by Jocelyn Gibb. In 1966 she wrote an essay for "Punch", "Genesis of a Novel", in which she mused on the detrimental effect of "Cold Comfort Farm" on her long term career. She likened the book to "some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but is often an embarrassment and a bore". Gibbons made her last overseas trip in 1966, to Grenoble in France where she visited her
Stella Gibbons "Occasional Poets", a work which included verses from part-time poets such as Iris Murdoch, William Golding, Alan Ayckbourn and Quentin Crisp. These were Gibbons's last published works. One of Gibbons's poems in the anthology was "Writ in Water", inspired by her love for the poetry of Keats. In 2013 the manuscript of this poem was presented to the Keats-Shelley Memorial House museum in Rome. Gibbons maintained a wide circle of friends, who in her later years included Adams, the entertainer Barry Humphries and the novelist John Braine. From the mid-1970s she established a pattern of monthly literary tea parties in