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 in her prose might, according to Gibbons's "Guardian" obituarist Richard Boston, be a reaction against the turbulent and sometimes violent emotions that she witnessed within her own family who, she said, "were all madly highly-sexed, like the Starkadders". It is, observed Neville, an irony that the overheated melodrama that Gibbons most disliked was at the heart of her one great success; Gibbons's writings on everyday life brought her restrained approval, but no noticeable literary recognition. Nevertheless, her straightforward, style, unadorned except in parody, is admired by Rachel Cooke, who praises her as "a sworn enemy of the flatulent, the pompous