(January 5th, 1902 — December 19th, 1989)

Stella Dorothea Gibbons was an English author, journalist, and poet.

Gibbons was born in a Kentish town. She was the oldest of three children, and her parents’ marriage was turbulent and abusive. For the first thirteen years of her life, she was educated by governesses. When she was finally sent to school, the transition to rigid and orderly learning was difficult.

Gibbons found university schedules much less strenuous. She took a journalism degree and began contributing poems and prose to magazines at that time. When she left university, she immediately began working for publishers and working on her writing career.

In the next three years, Gibbons’ life became very chaotic. Her mother died suddenly, and her father died five month’s later, leaving her as the only breadwinner for her family. Her youngest brother was still in school and her second brother had only intermittent work as an actor. She began a relationship with Walter Beck, a fairly well-to-do man, and became engaged to him, only to have the engagement end badly and painfully a few years later. She lost her job twice, though she was not unemployed for long.

Cold Comfort Farm, her first novel, was wildly successful. She began to work full-time as an author, and spent the rest of her years writing novels, journalism articles, poetry, and literary criticism. She married and had children, and remained in the literary eye until the last two decades of her life.

Her health deteriorated in the mid-1980s, and she died at home after collapsing the day before.