The House in Dormer Forest

As soon as I started this novel, I was very aware this must have been the book that inspired Stella Gibbons' parody, 'Cold Comfort Farm.'
Featuring the aptly named Darke family of Dormer House: stern father Solomon; mother Rachel, who spends her evenings tearing rags to shreds; their four adult children, all named after precious stones as their mother 'had been so bored by the advent of each child...that she had refused to think of any names for them', leaving the Rector, an authority on gems, to do so. With them live distant relative Catherine - outwardly lovely but malicious - and Rachel's mother, Mrs Velindre, undoubtedly the inspiration for Gibbons' Aunt Ada Doom.
' "Let us pray", said Solomon, and they all went down, with more or show more less grace, on to their knees.
When the others knelt, grandmother remained seated, like a stone idol which is immune, through its very stoniness, from human movement. It was understood that grandmother could not kneel. Only grandmother and her Creator knew that not her knees but her pride of years deterred her from this religious exercise...This remaining upright amidst a grovelling family gave her a satiric glee.'

Amid the at times quite comic family, and the more serious romantic plots involving the young people, Webb immerses us in lengthy paeans to the countryside and religion, some of which left me quite baffled:
'Enoch was never quite at his ease at Dormer. He liked to be out on the huge purple hills under the towering sky, where the curlews cried out strange news to him in passing, and the little brown doves murmured of a hidden country, a secret law, more limited than those of man, yet more miraculous. For there, to dream a nest is to build it. To desire the sea, or an orange tree in Africa is to obtain it. Genius and love are the nearest approach we have made to this wholly mysterious life...'
There's a LOT of this.
Over-the-top gothic melodrama; not recommended. show less

This is very interesting to read in the light of [Cold Comfort Farm] by [(Stella Gibbons)]. Gibbons wrote her novel to satirise novels based on rural life. The House in Dormer Forest seems to have an awful lot in common with Cold Comfort Farm. In particular both novels have the looming Grandmother figure, the house which has a life of its own, and many similar characters, from young and free spirited to old and laconic servants.
Another interesting feature is the emphasis on women's roles. How their power is formed or lost is explored with a wide variety of results. Some women bring a terrible life upon themselves. Others bear life's ignominies and cares with good spirits , while the heroine follows her intuitive desires to achieve the show more best of prospects in life.
Webb has a sense of humour and an occasional touch of acid in her descriptions of motives. Her famous love of nature is evident in the lyrical depiction of the forests around Dormer House.
Full of drama, sometimes melodrama, sometimes near comedy, the novel is not one of Webb's powerful tragic stories of love and loss. Instead, it is a very interesting glimpse of family life and social pressures in late nineteenth century rural England. show less