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
Denis Gibbons Denis Gibbons Denis Alfred Gibbons (19322011) was an Australian folk musician, radio announcer and musicologist. He started in radio in 1951 with the Macquarie Radio Network and began recording Australian folk music in 1954. His first albums were released in 1960 and he regularly appeared on Australia's Channel Nine as a lead-in to their news reports. In 1982 he received an Advance Australia award for "his outstanding contribution to Australian Folk Music". He worked as a producer for Radio Australia. He died in 2011. Denis Gibbons was born in 1932, his father, Alfred Charles Gibbons, was a hotelier. Gibbons grew