Stella Gibbons at Cold Comfort Farm", failed to equal the impact of the original. When the collection was reissued many years later it was described as "oddly comforting and amusing ... and possibly a truer depiction of the times than we might think". Gibbons published three novels during the war: "The Rich House" (1941), "Ticky" (1942) and "The Bachelor" (1944). "Ticky", a satire on mid-nineteenth century army life, was Gibbons's favourite of all her novels, although she acknowledged that hardly anyone liked it. It failed commercially, despite a favourable review in "The Times Literary Supplement". Oliver surmises that "the middle of 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.