A story for our times

It is hard to say if Cold Comfort Farm is prophecy or warning

- Jason Goodwin

ROBINSON CRUSOE is a lockdown story, as are most Golden Age detective novels, set in remote country houses: Jane Eyre and Rogue Male, but Stella Gibbons, wrote the lockdown story for our age.

Born in 1902, she was the eldest of three children whose father, a London GP, drank too much and played away. Stella escaped by taking a diploma course designed to ease demobbed soldiers into journalism. When her parents died she was left, aged 24, to look after her younger brothers; she moved them to Hampstead and turned out articles at The Lady where, in a small back room, she wrote a novel that made the office typists fall about laughing.

Cold Comfort Farm, published in 1932, was swiftly acclaimed as a comic masterpiece, poking fun at writers who took themselves too seriously. Virginia Woolf’s sense-of-humor failure is delicious. ‘I was enraged to see they gave the £40 to Gibbons,’ Woolf wrote to a friend when