Stella Gibbons

In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, Lynne Truss describes Gibbons' father, Telford..."the household was dominated by the violent temper of her father, who drank and womanized, and occasionally threw knives" and apparently liked to threaten to commit suicide. "His own father had been a similarly tyrannical and adulterous paterfamilias: Grandfather Gibbons had even had firearms, and would shoot blank cartridges at the ceiling to quell the noise of his children in the nursery upstairs."