Stella Gibbons at Cold Comfort Farm", failed to equal the impact of the original. When the collection was reissued many years later it was described as "oddly comforting and amusing ... and possibly a truer depiction of the times than we might think". Gibbons published three novels during the war: "The Rich House" (1941), "Ticky" (1942) and "The Bachelor" (1944). "Ticky", a satire on mid-nineteenth century army life, was Gibbons's favourite of all her novels, although she acknowledged that hardly anyone liked it. It failed commercially, despite a favourable review in "The Times Literary Supplement". Oliver surmises that "the middle of the
Stella Gibbons gentle powers (Pity, Affection, Time, Beauty, Laughter)" also flew in the face of a disillusioned modernism. The literary critic John Carey suggests that the abandonment by intellectuals of "the clerks and the suburbs" as subjects of literary interest provided an opening for writers prepared to exploit this underexplored area. He considers John Betjeman and Stevie Smith as two writers who successfully achieved this. Hammill believes that Gibbons should be named alongside these two, since in her writings she rejects the stereotypical view of suburbia as unexciting, conventional and limited. Instead, says Hammill, "Gibbons's fictional suburbs are socially and architecturally diverse,