 During her Evening Standard years , Gibbons persevered with poetry , and in September 1927 her poem " The Giraffes " appeared in The Criterion , a literary magazine edited by T. S. Eliot . This work was read and admired by Virginia Woolf , who enquired if Gibbons would write poems for the Woolf publishing house , the Hogarth Press . In January 1928 J. C. Squire , a leading voice in the " Georgian " poetry movement , began to publish Gibbons 's poems in his magazine , The London Mercury . Squire also persuaded Longmans to publish the first collection of Gibbons 's verses , entitled The Mountain Beast , which appeared in 1930 to critical approval . By this time her by @-@ line was appearing with increasing frequency in the Standard . As part of a series on " Unusual Women " she interviewed , among others , the former royal mistress Lillie Langtry . The paper also published several of Gibbons 's short stories . 
