 Gibbons maintained a wide circle of friends , who in her later years included Adams , the entertainer Barry Humphries and the novelist John Braine . From the mid @-@ 1970s she established a pattern of monthly literary tea parties in Oakshott Avenue at which , according to Neville , " she was known to expel guests if they were shrill , dramatic , or wrote tragic novels . " As her own productivity dwindled and finally ceased altogether , she kept a commonplace book in which she was recording her thoughts and opinions on literature as late as 1988 . 
