Cold Comfort Farm

Like watching a chemical reaction where a solution of part Mary Poppins part Jane Austen dissolves a thick wodge of Thomas Hardy into a bubbling froth, our heroine takes on a farm of melodramatic pastoral archetypes filled with suspicion and paranoia and religion and assorted passions and oppressions and neurosis and casually dismantles them and gives everyone a happy ending using only taste, restraint and intelligence. Most pages yield up at least one laugh-out-loud gem, the names are hilarious and the passages of particular literary merit are marked with stars for your convenience. Utterly lovable.

Better than I'd anticipated. Reading a lot of older stuff, I've learned the hard way that spoofs are generally to be leery of if you don't already know the subject matter they're poking fun at. I've not sampled the worst of the Victorian literature with rural settings that's being targeted, but here's a happy instance where enough can be inferred that Stella Gibbons still lets me in on the joke. From what I gather, they tend to be dark, dreary and weighty. What they were long in need of was a good no-nonsense city dweller to tidy up their act, and that's exactly what Gibbons provides in the character of Flora Poste, a sort of Mary Poppins for the adult set.

It's no easy task Flora is confronted with. Cold Comfort Farm is as intimidating show more as they come, with its elderly tiresome cranks, its dangerously lecherous younger man, its flighty child-like waif on the verge of womanhood, its hell-and-brimstone preacher, etc. Flora is equal to every challenge, even a tiresome would-be love interest who tries to throw her mission off track (but she's having none of it). It's amazing what a little common sense can do when applied to this supposedly cursed setting and its travails that appears to prefer wallowing in its misery sooner than help itself.

Gibbons' brief introduction offers a bonus stab at the genre. In a letter to her (probably fictional) friend, she writes that in this first effort at novel writing she's taken the trouble to highlight with asterisks those paragraphs where she tried hardest to emulate her friend's superior style. When those asterisks appear, what we get are florid descriptive passages written in an almost entirely different voice that grant some passing idea of the Victorian style she's taking down a notch. These samples are probably far more entertaining than the genuine article, but close enough to assure me the originals had this attack on their integrity coming. show less

This book is hilarious. More than once I made a fool of myself while reading it in front of other people, bursting out in spontaneous laughter when I got to a particular passage. It is pure parody. But of course, it helps to know what is being parodied: the object of derision here is the rustic, rural life portrayed in countless novels by D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Mary Webb. But even if you’re not familiar with the dark, brooding nature of some of these characters, I think the book remains funny because it has aged very well.

The book begins with the death of the Flora Poste’s parents, and her relatively blasé reaction. Unaffected though she is, she finds that her parents have left no money to support her, and she simply show more cannot bring herself to work for a living. Instead, she decides to impose upon her cousins, the Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm with only the aid of a favorite book, “The Higher Common Sense.” This is when the fun begins.

On arriving at Cold Comfort Farm, she finds a host of backward, absurd rubes with names like Urk, Elfine, and Amos. (On the farm, there are four cows named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless, and Pointless.) Presiding over the whole clan is the loony, elderly matriarch Aunt Adam Doom, who at one point repeatedly declares that she “saw something nasty in the woodshed.” But none of this manages to perturb Flora, whose Englishness seems to foreordain a neat, tidy plan for everyone involved. She rescues Elfine from a freewheeling “loam and lovechild” life of writing poetry, and marries her off to a local man by the name of Richard Hawk-Monitor. She sets up Mr. Mybug, an officious hack-scholar who is working on a book supposedly demonstrating that the works of the Bronte sisters are really the product of their brother Branwell, with a girl named Rennett. Perhaps her biggest accomplishment is convincing Aunt Adam Doom to leave Cold Comfort Farm to finally leave the room she has confined herself to for twenty years to spend some time in Paris.

This novel is wonderful lightness, but that should not be confused with being light: it is so wonderfully crafted, full of such deft sharpness and acerbic wit that it is difficult to write off as simply a parlor game satire. The narrative voice is memorably tart and sardonic, but not overweening. Whenever you think that Flora will trip up in one of her plans, you find that she is already three steps ahead of you: in fact, she already has you, the reader, figured out. The silly, unbelievable characters do prevent Flora from having a Big Problem to solve, but I always appreciated her ability to compartmentalize, rationalize, and order what she conceived to be a very disorderly universe. It struck me as a very English theme. And you’ll probably walk away from the novel smirking at yourself if you’ve ever admitted that you admired a novel by Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence. show less

I was hooked on this comic novel as soon as I began reading the arch Foreword addressed to the mythical (but not imaginary) Anthony Pookworth, Esq., A.B.S., L.L.R. This makes clear that Gibbons, in her debut, intends to send up the popular fiction of her day.

My enjoyment continued for the first two chapters, which introduce us to the heroine, Flora Poste. After finishing her education, she discovers that her recently deceased father was not as prosperous as assumed. Flora is unprepared to support herself in any of the usual ways, and the £100 per year she is left with will hardly finance the lifestyle she enjoys.

She decides she has no choice but to live off relatives, but the only positive (if it can be called that) reply to her show more inquiries takes her to the titular farm in Sussex. Here, she discovers her vocation: she reveals herself to be a more successful version of Jane Austen’s Emma.

I found reading more difficult when the scene first shifted from city to farm. While I quickly got accustomed to the rural Sussex dialect, I found the depiction of the setting and its quirky inhabitants overdrawn. I soon found my footing, though, and it wasn’t long before I was once again laughing out loud.

Gibbons draws attention to her purposely florid prose by assigning one, two, or three stars to what she considers the “finer” passages, in the spirit of a Baedeker guide, as she explains. The first is a two-star passage that opens Chapter Three: “Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.”

Even when not mimicking the style of the fiction she is satirizing, Gibbons employs a wide vocabulary and fresh, vivid similes. This was vacation reading, so I didn’t stop to look up the many unfamiliar words, but the sense was always clear from the context.

Except for the lag in interest when the scene shifted to the farm, I enjoyed this novel. In fact, I raced through the second half as Flora’s schemes were set in place and came to fruition. Self-assured, sure-footed Flora succeeds in every way, except for finding out what Aunt Ada Doom witnessed in the woodshed as a young child. show less

Rereading it is just as satisfying as the last time. Funny, pragmatic Flora Poste sets out to organize her wayward farm relatives into better lives, and no gothic language or leering darkness will get in her way. Stella Gibbons has a thing or two to teach the Price and Prejudice and Zombies crowd about truly biting parody.

"The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living." (page 11 of this edition)

Having only a tiny inheritance, Flora decides she must find some relatives to stay with until she can find a way to make her way in the world. She has three distant relatives, including one in Scotland, one in Hertfordshire, one in Kensington who breeds dogs, and some distant cousins who live on a farm in Sussex. She writes to them promptly to see if anyone is willing to take her show more in, and gets only one offer, “written upon cheap lined paper, in a bold but illiterate hand” from her great aunt Ada Doom Starkadder of Cold Comfort Farm.

There Flora goes to settle as best she can on a farm “crouched on a bleak hill-side” with her hitherto unmet relatives, a lot as eccentric as any dreamed by the Brontë sisters, and as gloomy and bitter as any you would meet in a book by Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence, only more so, comically more so. They constantly bicker with each other. The livestock on the farm consists of a horse aptly named Viper, Big Business, a bull confined permanently in the barn and cows named Feckless, Aimless, Pointless, and Graceless.

Aunt Ada rules the roost from her bedroom. She’s a recluse who only emerges occasionally to bemoan the fact that she once saw something that no child should ever see in the barn and hysterically claim that as a result of this trauma she will go mad if any member of the family should leave the farm. She also doles out the money sparingly to the family and the farm hands.

Flora decides that these poor people desperately need help. And with guidance gleaned from The Higher Common Sense by the Abbe Fausse-Maigre, and her own organizing skill she sets out to do it. With determination, skillful guile, and clever manipulation she achieves extremely satisfying results. show less

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons is supposed to be a parody of a certain type of novel that was popular at the time (the nineteen-thirties). Perhaps I am fortunate not to have read these novels for I found Gibbons' novel to be more strange than comic for the first six chapters. It was not until Flora Poste, the bright young heroine, met the brothers Seth and Reuben and her cousin Amos that I began to enjoy the humor in this unusual little book. It seems that Seth's view of women is summed up in his comment to Flora, "Now I - I don't let no women eat me. I eats them instead."(p 82) And if Seth eats women, cousin Amos literally eats everything else (usually more than one helping). So there was some humor in this odd novel and in its show more attempt to parody the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden, accounts of rural life popular at the time by writers such as Mary Webb (author of Precious Bane which I have yet to read beyond page ten). Gibbons was working for the Evening Standard in 1928 when they decided to serialise Webb's first novel, The Golden Arrow, and had the job of summarising the plot of earlier installments. Other novelists in the tradition were apparently parodied by Cold Comfort Farm but the only suggestions that come to my mind would be early Hardy or perhaps Wuthering Heights.

The novel tells the story of Flora Poste who having been orphaned is looking for relatives with whom to live. After rejecting a number of others, she chooses the Starkadders (not a good sign when you're headed for a stay with a family of that name), relatives on her mother's side, who live in the isolated(very!) Cold Comfort Farm, near the fictional Sussex village of Howling. Greeting her as "Robert Poste's child", they take her in to repay some unexplained wrong done to her father.
Each of the extended family has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred or fear; and the farm is badly run, supposedly cursed, and presided over by the unseen presence of Aunt Ada Doom, who is said to be mad through having seen "something nasty in the woodshed" as a child. As an educated, level-headed urban woman, Flora applies modern common sense to their problems and helps them all adapt to the twentieth century.
Thus we have a contrast between the rustics living in nature, perhaps too close to a "state of nature", and civilization represented by the educated young woman. The rustics don't have a chance, but in bringing order into their chaos I'm not sure that Flora was doing a good thing. This may appear to be a parody of certain overwrought novels, but it may also be an omen of what the twentieth century activists for social change had in mind for England. Some readers may appreciate the humor in this novel more than I did, but I relished the ideas implicit in the story whether intentional or otherwise. show less