Well-first of all, I used to stand quite still and stare at the trees and not think about anything.… But I found that people would bump into me, so I had to give up standing still and run after the ball like the others… until I found they didn't like me doing that, because I never got near it or hit it or did whatever you're supposed to do with it. In a very funny and clearly autobiographical passage at the beginning of Cold Comfort Farm, Flora Poste is asked by her friend how she managed to survive a school career of organized games without getting to like them: When she finally went to school, at age 13, she was no happier. She also buried herself in books with exotic settings, such as Disraeli's Alroy and Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh. As a means of escape, she made up fairy tales which she told to her two younger brothers. Not being allowed to go to school until she was in her teens did not help. Her father's medical practice was in a poor part of London, and the grinding poverty she saw around her, combined with the sterility of her family life, depressed the young girl. Stella Gibbons did not have a happy childhood. The Mountain Beast and Other Poems (1930) Cold Comfort Farm (1932) Bassett (1934) Nightingale Wood (1938) Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940) The Bachelor (1944) Gentle Powers (1946) Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1949) Collected Poems (1950) Here Be Dragons (1956) The Charmers (1965) Starlight (1967) The Snow Woman (1969) The Woods in Winter (1970). Worked as a decoder for the British United Press spent ten years in Fleet Street working on various jobs-literary and drama criticism, fashion writing, special reporting, while doing some creative writing of her own published first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932), which brought her instant fame over the next 40 years, wrote 25 novels, together with four volumes of poetry, and three collections of short stories (none, however, were to achieve the same success).

Born Stella Dorothea Gibbons on January 5, 1902, in London, England died in December 1989 at age 87 eldest child of Telford Charles Gibbons (a north London doctor) and Maud Williams educated at home by governesses until age 13, when she attended the North London Collegiate School took journalism course at University College, London married Allan Bourne Webb (an actor and opera singer), in 1933 children: a daughter. British novelist and poet, best known as the author of Cold Comfort Farm.

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