 Truss highlights the importance that Gibbons places on detachment as a necessary adjunct to effective writing : " Like many a good doctor , she seems to have considered sympathy a peculiar and redundant emotion , and a terrible waste of time . " This matter @-@ of @-@ fact quality in her prose might , according to Gibbons 's Guardian obituarist Richard Boston , be a reaction against the turbulent and sometimes violent emotions that she witnessed within her own family who , she said , " were all madly highly @-@ sexed , like the Starkadders " . It is , observed Neville , an irony that the overheated melodrama that Gibbons most disliked was at the heart of her one great success ; Gibbons 's writings on everyday life brought her restrained approval , but no noticeable literary recognition . Nevertheless , her straightforward , style , unadorned except in parody , is admired by Rachel Cooke , who praises her as " a sworn enemy of the flatulent , the pompous and the excessively sentimental . " While short of sentimentality , Gibbons 's writing , in prose or verse , did not lack sensitivity . She had what one analyst described as " a rare ability to enter into the feelings of the uncommunicative and to bring to life the emotions of the unremarkable " . Some of Gibbons 's poetry expressed her love of nature and a prophetic awareness for environmental issues such as sea pollution , decades before such concerns became fashionable . In a critical summary of Gibbons 's poems , <unk> <unk> has described them as " slight lyrics ... [ which ] tend toward classic , even archaic , diction , and only occasionally ... show flashes of the novels ' wit " . 
