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
Stella Gibbons a leading voice in the "Georgian" poetry movement, began to publish Gibbons's poems in his magazine, "The London Mercury". Squire also persuaded Longmans to publish the first collection of Gibbons's verses, entitled "The Mountain Beast", which appeared in 1930 to critical approval. By this time her by-line was appearing with increasing frequency in the "Standard". As part of a series on "Unusual Women" she interviewed, among others, the former royal mistress Lillie Langtry. The paper also published several of Gibbons's short stories. Despite this evident industry, Gibbons was dismissed from the "Standard" in August 1930. This was ostensibly an economy