 In March 1931 Gibbons had become engaged to Allan Webb , a budding actor and opera singer five years her junior . He was the son of a cricketing parson , and the grandson of Allan Becher Webb , a former Bishop of Bloemfontein who served as Dean of Salisbury Cathedral . On 1 April 1933 the couple were married at St Matthew 's , Bayswater . Later that year she learned that Cold Comfort Farm had been awarded the Prix Étranger , the foreign novel category of the prestigious French literary prize , the Prix Femina . It had won against works by two more experienced writers , Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann . This outcome irritated Virginia Woolf , herself a former Prix Étranger winner , who wrote to Bowen : " I was enraged to see they gave the £ 40 ( the cash value of the prize ) to Gibbons ; still , now you and Rosamond can join in blaming her " . Cooke observes that of all the Prix Étranger winners from the inter @-@ war years , only Cold Comfort Farm and Woolf 's To the Lighthouse are remembered today , and that only the former has bequeathed a phrase that has passed into common usage : " something nasty in the woodshed " . 
