Stella Gibbons; Author of ‘Cold Comfort Farm’

Stella Gibbons, a prolific writer who will probably be remembered only for “Cold Comfort Farm,” her satiric tale of comic genius, died Tuesday at age 87.

Miss Gibbons, who suffered from a heart condition, died at her home in north London.

She wrote more than 30 novels and volumes of short stories and poems, but none rivaled her celebrated satire, which parodied an earthy, regional school of writing popular at the turn of the century.

“Cold Comfort Farm,” published in 1932, tells how the sophisticated Flora Poste visits her rural relatives, the weird Starkadder family, and reclaims them from gloom, doom and feuding.

The Starkadders featured Aunt Ada Doom, Big Business the bull and Our Graceless, a three-legged cow with a wooden leg.

In guidebook manner, the novelist inserted asterisks to mark passages characteristic of the authors she parodied, including Thomas Hardy, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Mary Webb and D.H. Lawrence.

She gave herself two stars for, “The cries from the little hut had stopped. An exhausted silence, brimmed with the enervating weakness which follows a stupendous effort, mounted from the stagnant air in the yard, like a miasma. . . .”

Miss Gibbons’ 1933 poem, “The Marriage of Machines,” prophesied world pollution and destruction of wildlife.

She had been reclusive for the last 30 years, said her son-in-law, John Richardson.

“She hated all publicity and politics and really disliked modern life,” he said.