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
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