The literary critic John Carey suggests that the abandonment by intellectuals of "the clerks and the suburbs" as subjects of literary interest provided an opening for writers prepared to exploit this underexplored area. He considers John Betjeman and Stevie Smith as two writers who successfully achieved this. Hammill believes that Gibbons should be named alongside these two, since in her writings she rejects the stereotypical view of suburbia as unexciting, conventional and limited. Instead, says Hammill, "Gibbons's fictional suburbs are socially and architecturally diverse, and her characters—who range from experimental writers to shopkeepers—read and interpret suburban styles and values in varying and incompatible ways". Hammill adds that Gibbons's strong identification with her own suburban home, in which she lived for 53 years, may have influenced her preference to stay outside the mainstream of metropolitan literary life, and from time to time mock it.