Stella Gibbons of Leicestershire, suggested "Cold Comfort" as an alternative, using the name of a farm in the Hinckley area. Gibbons was delighted with the suggestion, and the work was published as "Cold Comfort Farm" in September 1932. The plot concerns the efforts of "a rational, bossy London heroine" to bring order and serenity to her rustic relations, the Starkadders, on their run-down Sussex farm. According to the "Feminist Companion to Literature in English", Gibbons's parody "[demolishes] ... the stock-in-trade of earthy regionalists such as Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith and D. H. Lawrence". The literary scholar Faye Hammill describes the
Thomas Gibbons (hymn writer) Thomas Gibbons (hymn writer) Dr. Thomas Gibbons (1720–1785) was a London nonconformist minister who wrote hymns, sermons, and poetry. He was the son of Thomas Gibbons, at one time minister of a dissenting congregation at Olney in Buckinghamshire, and afterwards of a congregation at Royston in Hertfordshire. He was born at Reach, Cambridgeshire, on 31 May 1720, and went to local schools. At about 15 years of age he was sent to Abraham Taylor's dissenting academy in Deptford, and then to that of John Eames in Moorfields. In 1742 Gibbons was appointed assistant to the Rev. Thomas Bures, minister of