Enbury Heath

Cold Comfort Farm is Gibbons' brilliant parody of the pastoral novel; Enbury Heath is her novel for Londoners. Stella Gibbons and her little brothers spent many years living in Vale Cottage in Hampstead Heath. This wonderfully funny and satirical novel is the fictionalised account of that time. The spiritual predecessor to Gibbons' best-known novel Cold Comfort Farm, Enbury Heath muses on childhood and family, nature and the city, money troubles and capitalism. Despite the overshadowing effect that Cold Comfort Farm had on her later writing, Gibbons was truly a London novelist, and lived in North and Northwest London for the vast majority of her life. This book is comic love letter to the city that gave her the means and freedom to write.