The couple bought a house in Malden Crescent, Kentish Town, a working-class district of North London, where Telford established the medical practice in which he continued for the remainder of his life.

[3] The atmosphere in the Kentish Town house echoed that of the elder Gibbons's household, and was dominated by Telford's frequent bouts of ill-temper, drinking, womanising and occasional acts of violence.

[9] After the haphazard teaching methods of her governesses, Stella initially had difficulty in adjusting to the strict discipline of the school, and found many of its rules and practices oppressive.

[11] After the stifling experience of school, Gibbons found university exhilarating and made numerous friendships, particularly with Ida Affleck Graves, an aspiring poet who, although on a different course, attended some of the same lectures.

The three set up home in a cottage on the Vale of Health, a small settlement in the middle of Hampstead Heath, with literary connections to Keats (whom Gibbons revered),[15] Leigh Hunt and D. H.

[16] Later that year, as a result of an error involving the calculation and reporting of foreign exchange rates, Gibbons was sacked from the BUP, but quickly found a new position as secretary to the editor of the London Evening Standard.

[29] The plot concerns the efforts of "a rational, bossy London heroine"[30] 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.

[6] One critic found it hard to accept that so well-developed a parody was the work of a scarcely known woman writer, and speculated that "Stella Gibbons" was a pen-name for Evelyn Waugh.

[41] This outcome irritated Virginia Woolf, herself a former Prix Étranger winner, who wrote to Bowen: "I was enraged to see they gave the £40 (the cash value of the prize) to Gibbons; still, now you and Rosamond can join in blaming her".

[42] Cooke observes that of all the Prix Étranger winners from the inter-war years, only Cold Comfort Farm and Woolf's To the Lighthouse are remembered today, and that only the former has bequeathed a phrase that has passed into common usage: "something nasty in the woodshed".

[43] From November 1936 the family home was in Oakshott Avenue, on the Holly Lodge Estate off Highgate West Hill, where Gibbons regularly worked in the mornings from ten until lunchtime.

[45] Enbury Heath (1935) is 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".

[46] 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.

[6][49] She published two collections of poetry in the 1930s, the latter of which, The Lowland Verses (1938) contains "The Marriage of the Machine", an early lament on the effects of industrial pollution: "What oil, what poison lulls/Your wings and webs, my cormorants and gulls?

The book incorporates a comic depiction of the novelist Charles Morgan, whose novel The Fountain Gibbons had reviewed before the war and found "offensive as well as wearisome".

[61][n 5] In her introduction to the book's 2011 reprint, Lynne Truss describes it as "a rich, mature novel, romantic and wistful, full of rounded characters and terrific dialogue" that deserved more commercial success than it received.

[21] There is much mockery of contemporary and indeed future artistic and intellectual trends, before the male Starkadders return from overseas, wreck the centre and restore the farm to its original primitive state.

[67] Gibbons, who wrote the introduction to the 1957 Heritage edition of Sense and Sensibility,[65] was a long-time admirer of Austen, and had described her in a Lady article as "one of the most exquisite" of woman artists.

This visit provided material for her 1968 novel The Snow Woman in which Gibbons overcame her habitual distaste for emotional excess by opening the book with a melodramatic birth on a sofa.

She kept her health and looks until almost the end of her life—in a biographical sketch, Jill Neville recorded that "her beauty endured, as did her upright carriage, typical of Edwardian ladies who were forced as girls to walk around with a book balanced on their heads.

[77][79] From the mid-1970s she established a pattern of monthly literary tea parties in Oakshott Avenue at which, according to Neville, "she was known to expel guests if they were shrill, dramatic, or wrote tragic novels.

[82][85] Truss has described Gibbons as "the Jane Austen of the 20th century",[82][n 7] a parallel which the novelist Malcolm Bradbury thought apt; Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm, with her "higher common sense", is "a Jane-ite heroine transformed into a clear-eyed modern woman".

[86] Truss highlights the importance that Gibbons places on detachment as a necessary adjunct to effective writing: "Like many a good doctor, she seems to have considered sympathy a peculiar and redundant emotion, and a terrible waste of time.

"[49] This matter-of-fact quality in her prose might, according to Gibbons's Guardian obituarist Richard Boston, be a reaction against the turbulent and sometimes violent emotions that she witnessed within her own family who, she said, "were all madly highly-sexed, like the Starkadders".

[6] In a critical summary of Gibbons's poems, Loralee MacPike has described them as "slight lyrics ... [which] tend toward classic, even archaic, diction, and only occasionally ... show flashes of the novels' wit".

[6] The 1985 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature defines Gibbons solely in terms of Cold Comfort Farm; it mentions none of her other works—while providing her bêtes noires Morgan and Mary Webb with full entries.

[87] A more negative view of the book has been expressed by the literary critic Mary Beard, who considers it "a rather controlling victory of modern order, cleanliness, contraception and medicine over these messy, different, rural types ...

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".

[100] After many years in which almost all of Gibbons's output has been out of print, in 2011 the publishers Vintage Classics reissued paperback versions of Westwood, Starlight, and Conference at Cold Comfort Farm.