 In her time with The Lady , Gibbons established a reputation as a caustic book reviewer , and was particularly critical of the then fashionable " loam and lovechild " rural novels . Novelists such as Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye @-@ Smith had achieved considerable popularity through their depictions of country life ; Webb was a favourite of the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin . Gibbons had first become familiar with the genre in 1928 when she provided summaries of Webb 's The Golden Arrow for the Evening Standard 's 1928 serialisation . She found the writing overblown and the plotting ridiculous , and decided that her own first novel would be a comic parody of the genre . By February 1932 she had completed the manuscript and delivered it to her publishers , Longmans . 
