Cold Comfort Farm

by Stella Gibbons

Paperback, 1996

Status

Available

Call number

823.912

Publication

Penguin Classics (1996), Paperback, 240 pages

Description

Drama. Fiction. HTML: Strong of will and slender of ankle, twenty-year-old orphan Flora Poste is blessed with every virtue save that of being able to earn her own living. Casting around for suitable relatives with whom she can make her home, Flora alights on the mysterious Starkadders and, ignoring the horrified shrieks of her friends, heads down to darkest Sussex. There she is confronted by an exceptionally odd cast of characters: grief-stricken Judith, fervently religious Amos, the lusty. smouldering Seth, wild and mysterious Elfine and, of course, the invisible tyrant Great Aunt Ada Doom who saw something nasty in the woodshed. Many would be overcome by the simmering passions of the Starkadder family, but not Flora. All they need is a little organising. Stella Gibbons' deliciously witty parody has been delighting readers since 1932 and retains its original sunny charm in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation..… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member ncgraham

“I do not object to the phenomena, but I do object to the parrot.” — Flora Poste, Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm seems to be one of those books you either love or hate. I know some people who think it one of the greatest comic novels in the English languages; others find

it banal.

Well, I thought it was delightful.

The story revolves around Miss Flora Poste, an intrepid young lady who has recently lost both her parents and must now either find a job or cast herself upon the kindness of relatives. Being well-bred, she abhors the idea of work, so she resolves to go and stay with her cousins the Starkadders on Cold Comfort Farm, and spend her time in setting all their lives in order. The prospect turns out to be rather more difficult than she thinks, for they are a frightful mess, indigent and uncouth. Cousin Judith is gloomy and depressed on account of her son Seth’s behavior, and darkly mentions a great wrong that her man did to Flora’s father years before. That man, Cousin Amos, gets his satisfaction from preaching to the Quivering Brethren (“There’ll be no butter in hell!”). Their eldest son, Reuben, simply wants to see the farm run well, and is afraid the Flora has come to steal it; Seth, meanwhile, has bedded nearly every maiden in the county, but his real passion is for the talkies. And poor young Elfine, who runs wild along the moors, simply wants to marry Richard Hawk-Monitor. As for the great matriarch, Aunt Ada Doom, she saw something nasty in the woodshed years ago, and has been holding it over everyone’s heads ever since....

I read this book as part of a class on Jane Austen. This may seem odd at first—after all, what has Austen to do with a parody on the pastoral Gothic subgenre (leaving aside the fact that she wrote her own parody of a genre early on in her career)? On the surface, very little, the only connection seeming to be Flora’s statement that “when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion. But the whole book reminded me of a letter Charlotte Brontë once wrote about her forebear:

I have likewise read one of Miss Austen’s works, Emma—read it with interest and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have thought sensible and suitable—anything like warmth or enthusiasm, anything energetic, poignant, or heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these works.... She ... ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress.

In a sense, Cold Comfort Farm can be thought of as a response to Brontë’s letter, in which Austenesque sensibleness is matched against a “stormy Sisterhood” of animal passions, and thereafter conquers. Flora may not have the moral energy of an Austen heroine, but in temperament she comes quite close, especially to Emma, with whom she shares a little priggishness, a tendency to meddle, and a desire for everything to be “just so.” The inspiration for the residents of the farm is owing more to contemporary novelists and Thomas Hardy than to Charlotte, but they all live by her beloved passion rather than cold sense (and Elfine’s moor-wandering is definitely a nod to her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights). Another literary nod is found in the character of Mr. Mybug, a hilarious caricature of D. H. Lawrence. “He was not really interested in anything but sex” indeed!

But I’m probably being far too critical and scholarly about the whole thing. The book has numerous qualities of its own, apart from its connections to other novels, although I do think it can only be fully understood once those are brought to light. It is a tremendously funny work, and the characters end up being a lot more sympathetic than you might expect. Of course, this is a purely subjective reaction, and there will always be a million different opinions about any given book. I feel this is particularly the case with comedy: either it tickles your funny bone or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, then none of its other attractions will really be apparent. Thankfully, I can confess my funny bone tickled!

In passing, I would like to recommend the 1995 TV movie as supplemental viewing. There are a few minor changes to the plot and characters, but overall it captures the spirit and tone of its source material in a way that few film adaptations to. And the cast (Kate Beckinsale, Ian McKellen, Eileen Atkins) is just fantastic!

Definitely one of my favorite reads of 2010.

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LibraryThing member LizzieD

I don't think that this is the funniest book ever written as claimed by a blurb from the back cover of my copy, but it is funny. Not having read Mary Webb perhaps prevents my getting all the fun, but I've read enough Hardy to appreciate Gibbons's efforts.
Flora Poste, orphaned at 19 and being a

sensible young woman, decides that she cannot abide learning to be a secretary, and so she applies among her scattered relatives for someone to take her in. A positive response comes from her cousin Judith at Cold Comfort Farm in the wilds of Sussex, and Flora takes herself there. As Flora has predicted, Judith's husband's name is Amos and her sons are Reuben and Seth. The place lives up to its name as it is under the malignant control of Aunt Ada Doom who saw "something nasty in the woodshed" when she was a child. Flora is too enterprising to live in squalor, so she takes on Cold Comfort Farm with hilarious results.
Written in 1932 about a time "in the near future," Gibbons foresees a war that happens at about the right time, but most of the action is clearly 1930's with telegrams and private planes and well-cut hair and lovely clothes acquired by overnight trips to London by train. Flora deals handily with a Hellfire and brimstone preacher, a Hollywood-struck lady's man, devotees of water-voles and cows (and a liddle mop), a badly-dressed poet and a slightly fat intellectual, and finally with Aunt Ada Doom herself. If you revel in the clever and the ridiculous served like a frothy Hell's Angel with two ounces of brandy, this is the book for you.

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LibraryThing member atimco

I just finished Cold Comfort Farm in one sitting this afternoon. It's been on my to-read list for awhile now, having been touted by a friend as a very funny little bit of Britishness with hints of Austen and the Brontes. Anyone who knows me can testify that those particular names are always a good

selling point with me, so I requested the book from PaperBackSwap and pulled it this afternoon from the neat, elite little stack on my desk, the books "on deck" to be read.

I found it not nearly so funny or Austenian as I had been led to believe. When her parents die, Flora Poste finds herself with every useful accomplishment except the ability to make a living. She decides to descend upon her very interesting, very grotesque relatives in Sussex, the Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm. There she finds much that needs to taken in hand and organized. And she, of course, is the one to do it.

Cool, collected, and sophisticated, Flora reminds me of Austen's Emma with her incessant interfering with the lives of others. Only, Flora's exploits are not solely concerned with matchmaking, and her efforts are crowned with somewhat more success than those of her literary predecessor.

I found all the characters hard to like. Flora is abominably selfish and bored, a flippantly proper young woman who plays with people, carefully manipulating them like figurines on a chessboard. Several of the male characters exude aggressive, pushy sexuality so strongly as to be offensive just to read about! But I think what really gets me underneath is the idea that people can have their miserable lives fixed up by a change in circumstances and a few adroit maneuverings by a pretty mastermind. It just feels like such a temporary, pointless fix to me. Real-life issues aren't in circumstances; they're in us. Circumstances just bring them out.

In her foreword, Stella Gibbons says that she took the liberty of starring (***) what she calls "the finer passages" for the benefit of her readers (and critics). The result reads like an elaborate poking-fun at pretentious literature. Maybe funny — but it might be funnier if I knew it was supposed to be. As it is, I'm not sure when she's joking or being serious, and perhaps I feel a bit insecure about it!

In many ways this book reminded me of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, a story that started wonderfully but became increasingly banal, and which I finally did not like in the least. I know I'm in the minority for that opinion, and I expect it will be the same with this book.

I did finish it all in one sitting, but I kept flipping to the back and mentally measuring how much longer it would take me to finish it. There just wasn't much to pull me into the story. I have to like the characters for it to work, and I didn't. Mrs. Beetle was probably the only one I didn't mind very much.

All in all, I can't really recommend this one. I think I'll just go back to Austen.

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LibraryThing member emily_morine

Cold Comfort Farm is one of those books that inspires evangelism: people read it, think it's fantastic, and praise it in overly colored language to everyone around them, giving it as a gift on holidays, and following up with questions like "Have you read Cold Comfort Farm yet? Well, why not? It's

HILARIOUS! Go on, read it right now. I'll just sit here and wait." Which is, of course, a huge turn-off, and the poor recipient avoids the book out of harried annoyance. So please, feel no pressure at all: you needn't run out and buy Stella Gibbons's novel unless you really want to.

That said, it IS hilarious, and I do highly recommend it. Not many books keep me up past my bedtime in this era of the five-o-clock alarm, but this one did, and I was chuckling the entire time. I think its charm lies in the fact that, although it's a satire, it also imparts a sense of genuine, warm affection for the characters and literary modes it's lampooning. The oddball inhabitants of Cold Comfort - Aunt Ada Doom, conveniently mad; Judith, toiling under an incestuous obsession; Seth, bored by sex but passionate about talkies; Amos, who preaches hellfire and sends home for flannel shirts; and Flora Poste, officious and uselessly educated, who descends on the farm and applies her no-nonsense brand of "tidying" to her messy relatives - could be painted viciously or dismissively, but they're not. Instead, a reader gets a sense that while everyone is a bit silly, and take themselves more seriously than they ought, they're all decent folks at heart. It's a much gentler, happier poking of fun than something in the style of Thackeray or even Austen, and a reader leaves Cold Comfort Farm feeling refreshed, rather than anxious or world-weary.

The plot begins simply: nineteen-year-old society girl Flora, finding herself orphaned and in possession of a much smaller fortune than she'd anticipated, intrudes herself on her eclectic collection of rural relatives and attempts to bring their lives into what she considers better order. They've all resigned themselves to living out their days in a Gothic morass of moral and physical stagnation, and Flora's bracing if interfering assurances that this is not the way things are done, make for a hilarious counterpoint. But while this setup is funny (and gets steadily funnier as the plot thickens), the real charm is in Gibbons's method of developing it. There are all kinds of delightful little details, which I would probably appreciate even more on re-reading. Take, for example, this passage, in which Mrs. Smiling, Flora's brassière-obsessed friend, attempts to find the proper train for her:

Even Mrs. Smiling could not find much comfort in the time-table. It seemed to her even more confused than usual. Indeed, since the aerial routes and the well-organized road routes had appropriated three-quarters of the passengers who used to make their journeys by train, the remaining railway companies had fallen into a settled melancholy; an idle and repining despair invaded their literature, and its influence was noticeable even in their time-tables.

There was a train which left London Bridge at half past one for Howling. It was a slow train. It reached Godmere at three o'clock. At Godmere the traveler changed into another train. It was a slow train. It reached Beershorn at six o'clock. At Beershorn the train stopped; and there was no more idle chatter of the arrival and departure of trains. Only the simple sentence 'Howling (see Bershorn)' mocked, in its self-sufficing entity, the traveler.

Gibbons has a great ear for that classic British humor that revels in the absurdity of everyday life, and her poker face is impeccable. Her snappy wit is applied evenly to everyone in the book, from the country squire ("The idea, like most ideas, would simply never have entered his head") to an art-house bohemian ("who, like all loose-living persons, was extremely conventional") to Flora herself, as when she reflects that "One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favorite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing-gown." (This strikes me as snobbish but extremely understandable.) I found the caricature of the self-important male artiste-on-the-make to be especially satisfying:

It cannot be said that Flora really enjoyed taking walks with Mr. Mybug. To begin with, he was not really interested in anything but sex. This was understandable, if deplorable. After all, many of our best minds have had the same weakness. The trouble about Mr. Mybug was that ordinary subjects, which are not usually associated with sex even by our best minds, did suggest sex to Mr. Mybug, and he pointed them out and made comparisons and asked Flora what she thought about it all. Flora found it difficult to reply because she was not interested. She was therefore obliged merely to be polite, and Mr. Mybug mistook her lack of enthusiasm and thought it was due to inhibitions. He remarked how curious it was that most Englishwomen (most young Englishwomen, that was, Englishwomen of about nineteen to twenty-four) were inhibited. Cold, that was what young Englishwomen from nineteen to twenty-four were.

I love the way this passage points up the confusion, in some peoples' minds, between lack of interest because they are being complete self-involved bores, and lack of interest due to frigidity. Also, it's hilarious how his personal knowledge of sexual inhibition is limited to women between nineteen and twenty-four. Interesting how it pans out that way. But at the same time, the scene also parodies Flora's compulsion to continue walking with him for fear of rudeness, and the whole society's ridiculousness for being so predictable. This passage, for example, comes from Flora's first meeting with Mybug, and all of the assumptions she makes here prove perfectly correct (he has just asked if she cares for walking):

Now Flora was in a dreadful fix...For if she said that she adored walking, Mr. Mybug would drag her for miles in the rain while he talked about sex, and if she said that she liked it only in moderation, he would make her sit on wet stiles, while he tried to kiss her. If, again, she parried his question and said that she loathed walking, he would either suspect that she suspected that he wanted to kiss her, or else he would make her sit in some dire tea-room, while he talked more about sex and asked her what she felt about it.

I kind of imagine this is how it must have been to hang out with D.H. Lawrence.

Yet even Mr. Mybug turns out to be a decent sort at heart, and one feels more amused than frustrated with him. He, and all the other Cold Comfort characters, have become dear to my heart in the course of reading this slim volume, and I think that experience is at the core of all the pro-Gibbons evangelism. Her sense of humor may be a bit precious for some, but if the idea of one of the hardier young Wodehouse ladies (say, Pauline Stoker or Stiffy Byng) plopped down in the midst of an overwrought Victorian gothic/pastoral à la Thomas Hardy tickles your funnybone, then you, my friend, are in for a treat. Pick a copy up at your earliest convenience. If, you know, you feel like it.

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LibraryThing member katekf

Cold Comfort Farm is the perfect antidote to the Gothic genre of literature as it takes on people brooding on moors with a laugh and playful language. I first picked up this book from a relative's library and it is one of my favorites. The set up for what to expect appears in the author's preface

which is a letter to another writer. She explains that she was able to write a book but its funny not wonderfully serious. This prepares the reader for the satire that follows which pokes fun at the rich of 1950s London and the drear folks of the English countryside who seem trapped in a Bronte novel.

The main character sets herself to fixing things and ends up having a good time doing it though the author doesn't spare her as she is not as deep as she seems to be. This is a delight of a book and one I would recommend to anyone but especially to someone who is tired of the heavy weight of Gothic influenced books.

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LibraryThing member ctpress

There’s still hope for "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" when you find a gem like this comic novel among the chosen many.

Flora Poste, orphaned at nineteen, decides to visit her relatives who live at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex. Here she meets the doomed Starkadders and they are all very

suspicious and hostile towards her. But loaded with unusual determination she decides to breathe new life and change into these inhospitable relatives. And Cold Comfort Farm will never be the same again.

A great satire. The Starkadders are really weird. From hell-fire preaching Amos, to Aunt Ada doom, who only comes down from her bedroom twice every year. Family secrets are being revealed and strong habits changed due to the lovely Flora Poste and her untiring meddling.

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LibraryThing member RidgewayGirl

Miss Flora Poste would be perfectly at home in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. In temperament, she's more Jeeves than Wooster, but she's a woman who likes to go to dinner and out dancing with interesting companions, and she's aware of the importance of dressing for the occasion. At the beginning of Stella

Gibbons' excellent novel, Flora discovers that she possesses every art and grace save that of earning her own living. She determines that her best option is to go and live with relatives and so she ends up arriving at Cold Comfort Farm, in deepest Sussex, aware of nothing but that they feel that they owe her a debt due to some wrong done to her father decades earlier.

Cold Comfort Farm is a damp and depressing place, where emotions run higher than Charlotte Bronte would be entirely at ease with.

Judith's breath came in long shudders. She thrust her arms deeper into her shawl. The porridge gave an ominous, leering heave; it might almost have been endowed with life, so uncannily did its movements keep pace with the human passions that throbbed above it.

"Cur," said Judith, levelly, at last. "Coward! Liar! Libertine! Who were you with last night? Moll at the mill or Violet at the vicarage? Or Ivy, perhaps, at the ironmongery? Seth -- my son..." Her deep, dry voice quivered, but she whipped it back, and her next words flew out at him like a lash.

"Do you want to break my heart?"

"Yes," said Seth, with an elemental simplicity.

The porridge boiled over.

And into this seething cauldron of family passions and unsanitary conditions, marches Flora, who quickly sees that she has her work cut out for her, to bring light and happiness and order to the denizens of Cold Comfort Farm, Howling, Sussex.

A parody of the long forgotten genre of the rural melodrama, Cold Comfort Farm remains as approachable and humorous as it was when it was first published. Really, this was just a great deal of fun to read. Flora is a protagonist worth cheering for and her relentless good will and determination to set things to right have the reader hoping for happy solutions for every dour character.

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LibraryThing member tandah

I really enjoyed this book - on one hand, a witty p*take on alpha author DH Lawrence and gloomy Thomas Hardy, overt referencing of the Brontes, a slight nod to Austen's 'Emma' with slatherings of bread and butter; and on the other hand, just a good, funny read. The hero Flora, descends on gloomy

Cold Comfort Farm and its inhabitants, and then sets about to put all of their miserable little lives back to rights. If only it was so simple, perhaps it is. Anyway, 'Cold Comfort Farm' is truly a comfort book, and recommend it to anyone who is looking for a witty book that they can escape with for a little while.

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LibraryThing member Lisa2013

I would have put down and abandoned this book so quickly if I had not been reading it for my book club. As it was, I practically used speed reading techniques to get through it, something I never normally do, especially with fiction, as I enjoy savoring the language and content of books. I wanted

it to be over so I could read another book, almost any other book.

I think I’m the culprit who suggested this book for my book club. I wanted something funny as we’d been reading mostly very dark, depressing books, and this was to be our selection near the holidays.

I see others have rated this highly so I am curious as to what my book club members will think and eager to hear opposing opinions, and I assume there will be some.

I did not find this book at all entertaining (well, maybe about 5-10 out of 233 pages?) I did not laugh or even crack a smile more than once or twice. I didn’t feel connected to or care about any of the characters. I enjoy parodies but this one didn’t work for me at all. As I was reading, I was thinking that if the ending was interesting, I might up the book to a 2 star rating. Unfortunately, no satisfaction was forthcoming.

Now, I’ll have to go read the reviews of all those who gave this book 5 & 4 & 3 star ratings, and look forward to what members of my book group have to say about this book, especially any who enjoyed it. Maybe I’ll understand; I won’t be changing my rating though.

I wish we had read Emma instead!

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LibraryThing member lmichet

This is one of the most refreshingly silly and deftly-written books I have ever had the pleasure to get my hands on. As a parody of a genre that no longer exists, it might seem a bit remote, but it's so wonderfully done that I'm sure it will remain readable and enjoyable for many years. It's a

humour classic and the best parody I have ever read.

One of the best things about Gibbons' writing is that she really goes the extra yard. The notice in the beginning: "NOTE: The action of this story takes place in the near future" had entirely passed out of my mind until I stumbled upon her absurd mention of video-televisions and the "Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of '46" that have reduced Claud, Flora's friend, into a hilariously grim parody of a World War One veteran. A lesser writer would have confined herself to lampooning silly accents and the mysterious sukebind. But no-- Gibbons is fantastic. The starred passages are also an example of her ability to go above and beyond the call of parody: throughout this book, her clear and enjoyable style is punctuated by near-unreadable passages where she imitates the writing style of the genre she is imitating-- passages where suns set like overturned chamber-pots and young men rustle with animalistic passion on windy tors. It's absolutely amazing. I want to write something like this someday. I would die happy.

There is absolutely no reason not to read this book. It's a parody of a long-lost genre of steamy countryside romance, but it's also solid on its own two feet-- it's an absurd tale filled with fantastically outrageous characters who Gibbons treats with equal amounts of hilarity and compassion. And, like all good comedies from earlier eras, it ends with weddings and wallflowers. A masterpiece. Find it at once.

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LibraryThing member saroz

"There'll be no butter in hell!"

OK, I'll admit it: it took me a little while to get on the wavelength of this book. I received it as part of a Santa swap in December, and I asked for books that were witty and imaginative, so I had, at least, some small clue of what I was about to take in. I think I

was expecting something a little more P.G. Wodehouse (whose novels are overtly comic) than what I actually read: Gibbons' novel is a parody, certainly, but it takes great pains to read on the surface like the genuine article. A lot of her humor is very, very dry; if you can fall into it, it's hilarious, but if you can't, I can see how it would be a little puzzling. Truth be told, I think that's what I felt about the film version, which I saw some fifteen years ago. I spent the whole thing wondering, "Is this a joke?"

Yes. It's a joke. There are occasional little gags in the writing that should be a red flag to any reader. The most obvious, and actually one of my favorites, is the collection of cows at Cold Comfort Farm - Feckless, Aimless, Graceless and Pointless -and their habit of casually losing limbs. Once you notice that, you start to get wise to the entire book, complete with its insane made-up religious sect, its invented ruralisms ("mollocking," anyone?), and the protagonist's habit of sailing in and bringing modernity and civilization to the poor yokels. I've never spent time in the rural parts of England, but living as I do in the southern United States, there are whole sequences of the story I find laugh-out-loud funny: sometimes, it hits very, very close to home.

I won't pretend that Cold Comfort Farm is always an easy read - it probably helps to be more versed in the novels it clearly aims to satirize - but it's definitely an engaging one, and I probably wouldn't have tried it without someone basically putting the book into my hands, so: thank you! I obviously enjoyed myself, because while I was sitting and reading the book in a coffee shop, an older man tapped me on the shoulder. "Good choice, right?" he grinned.

He was right.

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LibraryThing member lauralkeet

At 19, Flora Poste found herself orphaned and with almost no income or property. However, she approached this potentially dire situation with optimism, asking several distant relatives whether they would be able to take her in. She received several offers of varying degrees of merit, ultimately

decided to make her home at Cold Comfort Farm, and very quickly moved from London to rural Sussex in southern England. Cold Comfort and its many characters form an amusing parody of English rural life. To start with, everything has a funny name: the Starkadder family; the village of Howling; the Condemn'd Man pub; the Church of the Quivering Brethren; cows named Feckless, Aimless, Graceless, and Pointless; and a bull named Big Business. And while some of the characters are typical farm workers, others have odd habits such as a fascination with water voles. The entire estate, such as it is, was ruled by Aunt Ada Doom who "saw something nasty in the woodshed" at a young age, rendering her unstable if not completely mad. At the time Flora came to Cold Comfort, Aunt Ada was nearly 80 and lived almost exclusively in her own quarters, yet she exercised a strangely high degree of control over the rest of the Starkadder family.
You told them you were mad. You had been mad since you saw something nasty in the woodshed, years and years and years ago. If any of them went away, to any other part of the country, you would go much madder. Any attempt by any of them to get away from the farm made one of your attacks of madness come on. It was unfortunate in some ways but useful in others... The woodshed incident had twisted something in your child-brain seventy years ago.

And seeing that it was because of that incident that you sat here ruling the roost and having five meals a day brought up to you as regularly as clockwork, it hadn't been such a bad break for you, that day you saw something nasty in the woodshed. (p. 115)

Flora, being well educated and refined, was clearly a fish out of water at Cold Comfort, but this did not stop her from taking on the farm as a kind of personal project. Her effort to "tidy up the farm" reached far beyond basic hygiene. Flora took selected Starkadder family members under her wing and "rehabilitated" each of them in her own way. There were many amusing situations described with clever prose. And yet, towards the end, the "over the top" nature of the characters began to wear on me, and I found it harder to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the book. However, this was a fun read and a nice break from heavier literature, and I can recommend it on that basis.

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LibraryThing member MelissaMcB

This satire of rural life novels was a lot of fun. Some of the characters, like Seth, made me laugh out loud every time they showed up. I would highly recommend the book and I can't wait to see the movie now.

LibraryThing member JBD1

I'd seen the movie previously so I had a little bit of a sense of what to expect here, but this surpassed expectations. A great parody. And I kept going to look up words only to find that Gibbons had made them up!

LibraryThing member Muscogulus

At the risk of coming across like Mr. Mybug, I’ll say that this 1932 novel reminds me of a good key lime pie: At first it promises a predictable mellow sweetness, but as you dig in, you find it has a bite to it. At bottom there's a coarse crustiness, ’though not without its own sweetness.

Now,

would you cah to accompany me on a walk across the moor?

Even though the book crams your memory with quips and cracks, there’s something melancholy about the whole experience of it. I was familiar with the plot, thanks to the recent movie. Was surprised, though, to find that Gibbons actually set the book about 20 years in the future, relative to 1932, with a few futuristic details that modern readers might easily overlook. One of Flora Poste’s male friends is able to see her on a television screen as they talk by telephone. (Flora, on a public phone, cannot see him.) It’s commonplace for well-to-do men to get around by airplane, and a parcel from France is delivered to the farm by air drop. Flora’s escort is saddened by his combat experiences during an imagined Anglo-Nicaraguan War of 1946 (an adventure that implies British intrusion into the American sphere of influence). Mrs. Smiling’s troop of male admirers are all employed in allegedly dangerous colonial posts, including one in Canada. In general, one gets the sense of a British Empire ca. 1952, grown even more domineering, opulent, and absurd than it was in 1932.

I enjoyed the double-asterisked passages that parody the nihilistic purple prose of the mid-century. Other readers might be baffled by these, and by the way Gibbons sometimes inflates her prose, then punctures it with a few short, seemingly artless comments. Readers who skip introductions may find themselves completely at sea. Other readers may fruitlessly comb the Unabridged looking for the definition of “sukebind” or “hoot-piece.”

The gross absurdities of the rural Starkadders are easy for readers to spot; the more subtle, but still keen-edged satire of “civilized” Britain, even of capable Flora and her circle, is I think what gives the novel its limey tartness.

Oh, if you’ve ever encountered a reference to “something nasty in the woodshed,” this is the novel that bequeathed that saying to the English language.

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LibraryThing member jason.goodwin

Brilliant, hilarious pastiche of rural novels

LibraryThing member upster

I love this book. It's one of three that I can go back to and read over and over and feel like I'm on holiday (the other two are 'The Enchanted April' and 'A Room with a View').

The book is about a girl (Flora Poste), who isn't entirely wealthy, but who doesn't need to worry about money either, who

goes off to a farm to live with relatives. It's a dark and dirty place and all the inhabitants are content with their lot, but Flora sees that things could be different and sets about changing things.

It's a great read.

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LibraryThing member miss_read

A deliciously biting parody, and I loved every page of it. In my next life, I'd like very much to be Flora Poste, wearing pretty green dresses, sitting in my parlor nibbling an apple while reading a Victorian novel and, of course, bringing order to the messy "uncivilised" lives of others. I'd like

to start at the beginning again and get another dose of mollocking, clettering, budding sukebind and nasty things in the woodshed. Just brilliant.

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LibraryThing member AJBraithwaite

I love Stella Gibbons' deliberately over-the-top prose and the way she marks particularly egregious examples with asterisks, for the benefit of reviewers. The made-up farm words are fabulous and so is her complete ignorance and disregard for the actual work of the farm. The story itself is a

triumph of consumerism over a more in-tune-with-nature style of life, so I ought to hate it, but can't because it's so much fun.

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LibraryThing member Eye_Gee

Nearly done and LOVING it.....
Now finished and it was great to the end. A timeless must-read for anyone who loves British humour.

LibraryThing member thebookmagpie

Yeah, I'll maybe reattempt this someday in a different mindset, but I strongly disliked the "voice" of the author - the humour was overly knowing and a bit smug.

LibraryThing member strandbooks

This is a charming funny parody of 18th century British literature and city vs rural living. Flora reminded me of Mary Poppins meets Emma. She likes everything tidy, especially people's lives and happy endings. The other characters were hilarious, and I did have a few laugh out loud moments. The

book was published in 1932, but the actual date was about 20 years in the future because the characters would reflect back on 1944 or 1938. I guess Gibbons expected people to just fly planes into people's backyards in 20 years. She also poked fun at intellectuals, specifically DH Lawrence. One character, Mr. Mybug, only wants to talk about sex. Flora finds him so dull and boring.
I wonder how this was received in 1932. I'm sure people found it hilarious, but also a tad bit risque.

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LibraryThing member joellalibrarything

This is one of the funniest books I've ever read! I didn't warm to Flora at first but she grew on me. Now I think every home should have one.

LibraryThing member antao

The first two-thirds of it are much funnier than the last third. Everything gets wrapped up incredibly neatly, which I suppose is the whole point, but it means there isn't a breath of air in the last pages, and you almost yearn for something to upset Flora's plans at the last minute. That said it's

quite witty and clever throughout, and Stella Gibbons' sentence construction is a thing to behold: she kind of combines mid-twentieth century Muriel Spark-ish tartness with the flawless, rolling rhythm of the Victorian sentence (or something like that). I can't believe this was her first novel; it's so poised.

I did wonder why the novel is set 'in the near future' and why there's all the emphasis on flying and other kinds of technologies. Just to point up the primitiveness of Cold Comfort Farm?

I also wondered why all the emphasis on Mr. Mybug. I found his first conversation with Flora about Bramwell Bronte and his gin-swilling sisters the funniest part of the book, but it did strike me that you could remove his character completely from the book and not really make any fundamental difference to how it is constructed (apart from needing to find another husband for Rennet). I wondered was Gibbons making a certain point of contrasting the sanity and civilised values of the female author (i.e. Austen as a model for Flora to attempt to copy) with the irrationality and egotism and sex-obsessiveness of her male counterpart (Lawrence perhaps?). That's probably way over the top, but it did seem like Gibbons might have had a satirical axe to grind or perhaps somebody specific in mind in the Mybug scenes.

I think the novel gives a glimpse into the ambivalent attitude to Jews that existed in England in the 1930s. Increasing numbers of Jews fled from Germany to other nations as the Nazis and Hitler slowly gained power, beginning early on in that decade. During the 30s increasing restrictions were brought in to limit the numbers of immigrants in several nations, culminating in the Evian Conference of 1938 where both the US and the UK refused to take further substantial numbers of refugees. I think Gibbons' whiff of anti-Semitism was found throughout literature at that time and right up until the end of WW2, when the nightmare of the Holocaust was finally revealed.

I remember Lowry hinting at the same thing in "Under the Volcano" when he wrote about Hugh's experiences as a young man. D. H. Lawrence famously referred to 'Jews of the wrong sort' in one of his short stories and Evelyn Waugh certainly included anti-Semitic and racist views in his novels, although it's always hard to separate the voice of the author from those of their characters. However, Gibbons suggesting that Mayfair would become a slum containing 'Jew shops' in her near future was certainly not comfortable to read. I see such writing as a part of history and something that should remain unchanged in the text as a lesson to future generations, should they choose to look for it.

This book is a satire that takes broad but, at heart, very loving, swipes at many different stereotypes. Oddly however, at the end, I felt the least affection for Flora herself as she tied up her own loose ends. But then again, that may have been the intention of the author....

To me "Cold Comfort Farm", the farm itself, is the prototype of a cult sustained by the dominance and even charisma of a mad, ignorant central personage. Flora goes into the protocol, without any authority, but perhaps propped up by some unknown rights (or wrongs) due her. In any event her right to be there is not imposed nor sustained by legal compulsion, nor are her actions and remedies. The fact that she has a desire to change these people by merely interacting with them freely if not spontaneously is not reprehensible. And these are not just rural types living differently from urban types. Perhaps no one is forcing them to comply with Ada Doom, but no one is forcing them to change either. They are being offered possibilities that they did not seem to imagine possible, and in each case pursuing those possibilities seemed to enrich their lives, in ways they chose to follow up on. Offering those possibilities is hardly wrong on Flora's part. In the end this extends to Ada Doom herself. Like those who were offered a choice of change before her, Ada by her own choice chooses to behave differently. If the commune/cult had system of dispersed values, in which different individuals lived communally according to their own beliefs, they would probably not have been so easily deprogrammed.

This kind of issue of cultlike behaviour, however large or small the cult, seems to me to be one of the most fundamental issues of our time, and Stella Gibbons was a true, perhaps even science fictional, visionary in this respect, intuiting on a small scale some of the religious, political, and social consequences of cults and sects and factions etc. Particularly for second or third generational members who are born into an extreme environment of belief and behavior chosen by their parents.
It does have some similarities to "Emma", but Flora does not enjoy social or economic power like Emma, all Flora has at her disposal is "Persuasion".

As for the parody elements, probably they are very important, but this is just a well written, interesting, and fun book that stands perfectly well on its own two legs.

"Cold Comfort Farm" seems positive enough, and I don't know what Gibbons' intentions were, but the Farm does vividly present to readers what seems very much a cult. And she does seem to have a powerful fascination with powerful personae. Given how potent, almost all powerful, such people were becoming, and would become, (based on personal charisma), in the modern world, the Lenins and Hitlers and Huey Longs, I find that to be the most interesting thing about the book. Sort of like "1984" or "Brave New World" in a sense. And of course, there is the explosive growth of small scale charismatic cults such as those of Jim Jones, Charles Manson, or David Koresh (Waco Texas). In the USA they abound, and while we do not read about them much here, a brief Google search seems to indicate they are not that plentiful in Europe, based on the usual suspects of religion, political ideology or just plain old sex.

"Cold Comfort Farm" is a very minor classic that absolutely transcends its time, place or literary heritage and I enjoyed reading it, especially since I had never heard of it or Stella Gibbons or Mary Webb, BUT I found it lacking in the genuine literary depth that Poe, Lowry, and Camus brought to the table. For me its best claim to literary substance remains its look at the all too human dynamics of the Farm and how such places can continue to be during the modern world, which Gibbons highlighted nicely by setting it in a still more modern and higher tech world of the future with telepresence and extreme possible mobility (I think that kind of personal air travel was a commonplace and common dream of futurisms in the 30s).

I was thinking of Mary Poppins/Nanny McFee as well, sweeping in, sorting out and sweeping out again. I suppose I should have found Flora irritating but somehow, I didn't. I think the charm of her character made it impossible for you not to warm to her. She might be a busy-body with tremendous in sight beyond her years and a no-nonsense brisk way of dealing with everything but her actions were because she had a good heart, she cared. There were some lovely extracts, I particularly loved her description of finding each new love resembling the old one 'just like trying balloon after balloon at a bad party and finding they all had holes in and would not blow up properly' - what a weird but amazing analogy! I Flora would have made a perfect parson's wife having ample opportunity to 'sort out' the entire congregation and community. I found it a little irritating that a lot of the 'problems' seem to involve a lot of money being thrown a them and would have loved to have been present during the long conversation between Flora and Aunt Ada Doom but the line 'and did the Goat die?' was so delightfully bizarre, you got the gist that the family feud was not quite so terrible as she had been led to believe. Some of her observations of life were a bit cynical and bitter for someone still relatively young and I wondered if Stella had been let down in love. she certainly had no time for pretentiousness or for people who allowed themselves to wallow in self-pity, no matter how much they enjoyed it.

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LibraryThing member Tess22

The funniest book I know and my absolute favourite of all time (an accolade I insisted on avoiding for many years). I don't judge people on how much or what they choose to read, but I do judge bookshops on whether or not they have a copy of this. Every character, every event, every page is perfect.

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