Stella Gibbons of Gibbons's "most enjoyable and vicious" satirical portraits. In her introduction to the book's 2011 reprint, Lynne Truss describes it as "a rich, mature novel, romantic and wistful, full of rounded characters and terrific dialogue" that deserved more commercial success than it received. The public's expectations were still prejudiced by "Cold Comfort Farm", which by 1949 had sold 28,000 copies in hardback and 315,000 in paperback. Anticipating that a sequel would be popular, that year Gibbons produced "Conference at Cold Comfort Farm", her shortest novel, in which the farm has become a conference centre and tourist attraction. There is much
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