CONTROVERSIAL columnist Liz Jones has claimed her car and home have been pelted with eggs within days of shots being fired at her postbox.

The writer has revealed that her home, near Exmoor, was targeted for a second time on Sunday, and blames the backlash from local residents angered by the barbed comments she has made in newspapers.

Yesterday, the 51-year-old took to the radio to go head-to-head with Exmoor-based journalist Jane Alexander, who wrote a piece in the Telegraph which claimed residents were "fizzing with fury" at Ms Jones's references about their "faintly Amish" way of life.

And Exmoor resident Rachel Johnson, editor of The Lady magazine, yesterday became the latest in a string of writers to speak out against Ms Jones's approach to relocating to the countryside.

In the Daily Mail, she warned that Ms Jones's habits of telling the world that she buys £20 bottles of wine and her insistence that she benefits the local economy by hiring an army of staff, including a holistic shearer and an equine podiatrist, made her sound like a "cross between Lady Bountiful and Marie Antoinette".

But, speaking on Radio Four's Woman's Hour yesterday, Ms Jones, who has depicted the locals as elderly and toothless, and claimed the food in Exmoor pubs was "stuck in the 70s", insisted the main thrust of her writing was negative only of her own inability to cope with rural life.

"The only person I have criticised is myself." She revealed that eggs were thrown at her front door and car on Sunday night, three days after a shotgun was fired at her mailbox. Ms Jones said: "I think it's doing Somerset a disservice. People are going to think 'I'm not going to come down here and have eggs smacked at my car'."

The former editor of Marie Claire magazine said she was inspired to move to the Westcountry by happy memories of family holidays to Sidmouth and Dartmouth.

She located after a messy and very public separation from her ex-husband, and said she wanted to be surrounded by beautiful countryside. "I was expecting... not a fairytale, because I knew it would be hard. But I wanted to live in a place less like my life in London. There, I went from a spa to Harvey Nichols to Prada. I had started to hate myself. I wanted to like myself again."

She said her book, The Exmoor Files, was about her changing as a person. "I got to Exmoor as Miss Super High-Maintenance-Fussy-Pants, and I had to have all that ripped away from me. I found out how jolly hard it was."

The interview came as Rachel Johnson, sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson and editor of The Lady, Britain's oldest women's magazine, wrote in the Daily Mail that she invited a lonely Ms Jones to a New Year's Eve party, against her better judgment. She relayed how the writer complained that none of the guests were "attractive", and expressed distaste at the decor, and later described the "awful New Year party in Simonsbath" in her writing.

Ms Johnson wrote: "I can't help wondering – was this all part of the plan? Leave London, come to Exmoor, get a book out of it, get more mileage out of the blowback when the book comes out, then get the hell out and do it all again somewhere else?

"I mean, if you'd ever been serious about living here, you would never have done it the way you did. You would have sunk roots, not stuck the boot in."