Stella Gibbons "she applied her versatility as a writer to every subject under the sun bar cookery, which was the province of a certain Mrs Peel." At the same time she began work on the novel that would become "Cold Comfort Farm"; her colleague and friend Elizabeth Coxhead recorded that Gibbons "neglected her duties disgracefully" to work on this project. In her time with "The Lady", Gibbons established a reputation as a caustic book reviewer, and was particularly critical of the then fashionable "loam and lovechild" rural novels. Novelists such as Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith had achieved considerable popularity through their
The Narrows (Petry novel) The Narrows (Petry novel) The Narrows is a 1953 novel by African-American writer Ann Petry. “The Narrows” is the name of the African-American section of the fictional town of Monmouth, Connecticut, in which most of the novel's action takes place. Though less famous than Petry's earlier novel, "The Street", "The Narrows" is her longest novel and, critic Hilary Holladay argues, her most complex: “"The Narrows" represents the full flowering of Petry’s preoccupation with human relationships.” The novel is written in the third person, narrated from the perspective of several different characters, often in flashback episodes. The epigraph in "The Narrows"