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
Kaye Gibbons Kaye Gibbons Kaye Gibbons (born May 5, 1960) is an American novelist. Her first novel, "Ellen Foster" (1987), received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gibbons is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and two of her books, "Ellen Foster" and "A Virtuous Woman", were selected for Oprah's Book Club in 1998. Gibbons was born in Nash County, North Carolina,