Stella Gibbons : Starlight

Stella Gibbons will always be best known for her first book, Cold Comfort Farm, published in 1932, winner of the Femina Vie Heureuse prize and described by the Sunday Times as ‘very probably the funniest book ever written’. I read it as a teenager and periodically reread it, but for a long time I had no idea that Stella Gibbons had written at least twenty-nine other novels. Thanks are due to the Dean Street press who have a project of republishing novels by writers like Margery Sharp and Stella Gibbons who were very aware of the class system of their time and not afraid to have characters who are old, irascible or working class (often all three).