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
Edward Stanley Gibbons Edward Stanley Gibbons Edward Stanley Gibbons (21 June 1840 – 17 February 1913) was an English stamp dealer and founder of Stanley Gibbons Ltd, publishers of the famous Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogue and other stamp-related books and magazines. Edward Stanley Gibbons was born at his father William Gibbons' chemist shop at 15 Treville Street, Plymouth on 21 June 1840, in the same year that the United Kingdom issued the Penny Black, which was the world's first postage stamp. Edward’s interest in postage stamps began whilst at Halloran’s Collegiate School. Gibbons, who was a member of The Plymouth Institution (now The