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 relatively faithful account of her childhood and early adult life with, according to Oliver, "only the thinnest veil of fictional gauze cover[ing] raw experience". "Miss Linsey and Pa" (1936) was thought by Nicola Beauman, in her analysis of women writers from 1914 to 1939, to parody Radclyffe Hall's 1928 lesbian novel "The Well of Loneliness". Gibbons's final prewar novels were "Nightingale Wood" (1935)—"Cinderella brought right up to date"—and "My American" (1939), which Oliver considers her most escapist novel, "a variant of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen"." Gibbons always considered herself a serious poet rather than a comic writer.