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 Jones (writer) Stella Jones (writer) Stella Marjorie Jones (née Claridge, 5 April 1904 – 6 June 1991) was a New Zealand playwright and writer. Jones was born in Kimbolton, near Feilding, New Zealand. She had six sisters and two brothers and her parents were Louise Mary Claridge (née Taylor) and James Henry Claridge. She grew up in a variety of small towns around the country, as her father was a newspaper editor and worked on a number of regional and small-town papers. In 1931, she married Arthur Thomas Jones. Jones began her career writing short stories and articles which were published in