Oddly enough, the superficial Austen connection that led me to this movie was the Emma-Kate Beckinsale one. Gibbons ofcourse has more Austen sprinkled along the tale.

Flora Poste is ostensibly a modern Emma, deriving a healthy cynicism from the intervening stereotyping of the countryside, authors, preachers, mad-women. The addition of the completely whimsical elements of "seeing something nasty in the woodshed" and the cows whose legs fall off from time to time, makes the book a jolly read. ( )

See, the thing is, that this is dark satire. This isn’t nudge and a wink and everything is put right in the end. It is put right in the end but the is a certain amount of cynicism here. And I like that.

Flora Post moves to Cold Comfort Farm after the death of her parents who she wasn’t really attached to. As it’s unacceptable to sponge of one’s friends she decides to live off her relations instead. Of course she goes around fixing their lives but it’s out of a love for ‘tidiness’ not real affection.

So it’s biting, funny and full of one liners. There is a great deal of literary criticism too. All of which make it a very fun read. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

When 19 year old Flora Poste finds herself orphaned and with little income, she decides to throw herself upon the mercy of her relatives, the Starkadders, at Cold Comfort Farm. When she arrives at the farm, she finds her hitherto unencountered relatives in a state of fragmentation and despondency. Her relatives include her perpetually distraught cousin Judith, and Judith's husband Amos, who loves to preach hellfire and damnation, the good looking but arrogant Seth and the reticent and suspicious Rueben, and the ethereal young child Elfine. It being Flora's nature to organise people's lives, she decides that she must take the opportunity to lead the Starkadders into a more conventional state of existence. However, the biggest obstacle to Flora's plans is the elusive matriarch, Aunt Ada Doom, a formidable woman who saw something in the woodshed decades earlier and has never recovered, and who has not left the farm for twenty years. Will Flora be able to rise to the challenge?

This book is extremely well written, with some wonderfully descriptive passages, especially with regard to the dull and gloomy state of the farm, which reflects the attitudes of the people who live within it.

It's described as hilarious; I would personally say that it was very amusing in parts, although it did not provide any big belly-laughs. Nonetheless, it was enjoyable throughout, with plenty of acerbic observations.

Flora is of course the main character, and although the book is narrated in the third person, events are largely portrayed from Flora's point of view. Credit must go to Stella Gibbons for making her such a likeable person, when in fact she spends much of her life interfering in the business of others and making wry observations on their lesser qualities. However, her good intentions shine through, and it was impossible for me not to hope that things turned out just as she had hoped (as for whether they did or not - I'm giving nothing away, but I would highly recommend that you read it to find out)!

All of the characters are portrayed well and with good humour. Flora herself reminded me somewhat of Emma Woodhouse, from Jane Austen's 'Emma' (Austen is referenced a few times throughout the book), and I like to think that if Austen herself had been writing novels some 120 years after her own lifetime, this would be the sort of thing she had written.

This is a gently diverting novel, which will make you smile, and it is an enjoyable book, which I suspect will benefit from repeated reads. ( )