Stella Gibbons full-time writing career. In March 1931 Gibbons had become engaged to Allan Webb, a budding actor and opera singer five years her junior. He was the son of a cricketing parson, and the grandson of Allan Becher Webb, a former Bishop of Bloemfontein who served as Dean of Salisbury Cathedral. On 1 April 1933 the couple were married at St Matthew's, Bayswater. Later that year she learned that "Cold Comfort Farm" had been awarded the "Prix Étranger", the foreign novel category of the prestigious French literary prize, the "Prix Femina". It had won against works by two more experienced writers,
Stella Gibbons controlling victory of modern order, cleanliness, contraception and medicine over these messy, different, rural types ... I found myself screaming for the rights of these poor country folk NOT to fall into the hands of people like Flora". Although Boston suggested that Gibbons's rating in the academic English Literature world ought to be high, her literary status is indeterminate. She did not promote herself, and was indifferent to the attractions of public life: "I'm not shy", she told Oliver, "I'm just unsociable". Truss records that Gibbons had "overtly rejected the literary world ... she didn't move in literary circles, or