 The title story in Gibbons 's 1940 collection , Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm , failed to equal the impact of the original . When the collection was reissued many years later it was described as " oddly comforting and amusing ... and possibly a truer depiction of the times than we might think " . Gibbons published three novels during the war : The Rich House ( 1941 ) , Ticky ( 1942 ) and The Bachelor ( 1944 ) . Ticky , a satire on mid @-@ nineteenth century army life , was Gibbons 's favourite from all her novels , although she acknowledged that hardly anyone liked it . It failed commercially , despite a favourable review in The Times Literary Supplement . Oliver surmises that " the middle of the Second World War was perhaps the wrong time to satirise ... the ridiculous and dangerous rituals that surround the male aggressive instinct " . The Bachelor won critical praise for its revealing account of life in war @-@ torn Britain — as did several of Gibbons 's postwar novels . 
