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
The Valley of Ghosts (novel) The Valley of Ghosts (novel) The Valley of Ghosts is a crime novel by the British writer Edgar Wallace which was first published in 1922. The novel was originally serialised in "The Popular Magazine", Jul 20-Sep 7, 1922, in four installments, and the first UK book edition was by Odhams Ltd., in London, in 1922. Small, Maynard & Company published the first US book edition, in New York, in 1923. Murder comes to a quiet settlement of the English countryside, and with more than one ghost. Why was Stella Nelson with the victim in the middle of the night, shortly