 After Webb 's death , Gibbons remained at Oakshott Avenue and continued to write novels . From 1961 she rented a summer house at Trevone in Cornwall , which became the setting for her 1962 novel The Weather at Tregulla . She returned to literary criticism after many years , when in 1965 she contributed an essay to Light on C.S. Lewis , a review of that writer 's work edited by Jocelyn Gibb . In 1966 she wrote an essay for Punch , " Genesis of a Novel " , in which she mused on the detrimental effect of Cold Comfort Farm on her long term career . She likened the book to " some unignorable old uncle , to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance , but is often an embarrassment and a bore " . Gibbons made her last overseas trip in 1966 , to Grenoble in France where she visited her old friend Elizabeth Coxhead . This visit provided material for her 1968 novel The Snow Woman in which Gibbons overcame her habitual distaste for emotional excess by opening the book with a melodramatic birth on a sofa . The Woods in Winter ( 1970 ) was her last published novel ; she decided at that point that she was no longer prepared to subject her work to editorial control . In the 1980s she wrote two more novels for private circulation among friends , The Yellow Houses and An Alpha . These books @-@ An Alpha retitled Pure Juliet — were published by Vintage Classics in 2016 , after the manuscripts were released by Gibbons 's family . 
