![]() ![]() An excoriating parody of the ‘Loam and Lovechild School of Fiction’, as represented in the works of authors such as Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith, and even D.H. ‘That Book’, as the author came to call it, had been a great popular success, had received rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, and in 1933 had won the Prix Étranger of the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse, much to the disgust of Virginia Woolf, a previous winner. Twenty years after its publication Cold Comfort Farm, her first novel, was still the standard against which all her subsequent work was, as here, judged. Early success had been for Stella Gibbons both a blessing and a burden. ![]() ![]() Reviewing The Swiss Summer, Vernon Fane wrote in The Sphere (22 December 1951), ‘Miss Stella Gibbons is one of those writers who can carry one along through the most improbable situations by the brightness of her observation of human foibles, and I, for one, am not going to regret that in this book she has come a long way from Cold Comfort Farm’. ![]()
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