poet. She established her reputation with her first novel, Cold Comfort
Farm (1932), which won the Prix Femina Étranger award. After an
indifferent school career Gibbons trained as a journalist, and worked as
a reporter and features writer. Her first book (1930) was a collection
of poems, and throughout her life she considered herself primarily a
poet rather than a novelist. After Cold Comfort Farm, a satire on the
genre of rural-themed novels popular in the late 1920s, most of
Gibbons's novels were based in the middle-class suburban world with
which she was familiar. Critics have compared her style to Jane
Austen's. Although she was active as a writer for half a century, none
of her later 22 novels or other literary works achieved the same popular
success, nor have they been accepted into the canon of English
literature, perhaps because of her detachment from the literary world
and her tendency to mock it. Much of her work was long out of print
before a modest revival in the 21st century.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Gibbons>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
1757:
Louis XV of France survived an assassination attempt by Robert-
François Damiens, who later became the last person to be executed in
the country by drawing and quartering.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert-Fran%C3%A7ois_Damiens>
1919:
The German Workers' Party, the forerunner to the Nazi Party,
was founded by Anton Drexler.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Workers%27_Party>
1941:
Second World War: Australian and British troops defeated
Italian forces in Bardia, Libya, the first battle of the war in which an
Australian Army formation took part.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bardia>
1976:
The Troubles: In response to the killings of six Catholics the
night before, the South Armagh Republican Action Force killed ten
Protestants in County Armagh, Northern Ireland.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsmill_massacre>
1991:
The United States Embassy to Somalia in Mogadishu was evacuated
by helicopter airlift days after violence enveloped Mogadishu during the
Somali Civil War.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eastern_Exit>
_____________________________
Wiktionary's word of the day:
Twelfth Night:
A Christian festival marking the coming of Epiphany and concluding the
Twelve Days of Christmas, traditionally falling on the evening of
January 5 (i.e., on the eve of Twelfth Day, January 6), but also
sometimes defined as falling on the evening of January 6 (i.e., on the
evening of Twelfth Day itself).
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Twelfth_Night>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an
honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have
settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed. He doesn't boast of
his own death or of others'. But he does not repent. He suffers and
keeps his mouth shut; if anything, others then exploit him, making him a
myth, while he, the man worthy of esteem, was only a poor creature who
reacted with dignity and courage in an event bigger than he was.
--Umberto Eco
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco>
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