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 old friend Elizabeth Coxhead. This visit provided material for her 1968 novel "The Snow Woman" in which Gibbons overcame her habitual distaste for emotional excess by opening the book with a melodramatic birth on a sofa. "The Woods in Winter" (1970) was her last published novel; she decided at that point that she was no longer prepared to subject her work to editorial control. In the 1980s she wrote two more novels for private circulation among friends, "The Yellow Houses" and "An Alpha". These books – "An Alpha" retitled "Pure Juliet" – were published by Vintage Classics in 2016, after