Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics)

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In 1981, the BBC produced a four-part radio adaptation by Elizabeth Proud, who also narrated. Patricia Gallimore played Flora, and Miriam Margolyes played Mrs. Beetle. In January 1983, a 2-part sequel, There Have Always Been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm, set several years later and based on Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, when Flora is married with several children, was broadcast, with Patricia Gallimore again playing Flora. Following the death of her parents, the book's heroine, Flora Poste, finds she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She decides to take advantage of the fact that "no limits are set, either by society or one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose on one's relatives", and settles on visiting her distant relatives at the isolated Cold Comfort Farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex. The inhabitants of the farm – Aunt Ada Doom, the Starkadders, and their extended family and workers – feel obliged to take her in to atone for an unspecified wrong once done to her father. This was Gibbons’ first novel. She went on to write 24 more novels plus collections of short stories and poetry. I will have to do further investigation of her… I was very impressed.

Flora glimpses her seventeen-year-old cousin, Elfine, who never attended school and spends most of her time wandering about the moors writing poetry. Flora hears Meriam, the hired girl, groaning while delivering her fourth illegitimate child by Seth. Conferring with Cousin Judith, Flora learns that Judith’s husband, Amos, did a great, secret wrong to Flora’s deceased father. Coarse and filled with lust for the land, Reuben is the only true farmer among the Starkadders. He suspects that Flora wants to take over the farm, but when she assures him that the farm is the last thing she wants, she wins him over. Seth makes suggestive advances to her, but Flora discovers that his great love in life is not women, as she has assumed, but “the talkies.” Though exhausted by her interaction with these family members, Flora decides she must become acquainted with the other Starkadders. Flora has come along and tamed the wild Starkadders and sanitised their farm. She's interfered. She is like Jane Austen's Emma, only she never gets her comeuppance and never learns not to meddle. This is a very funny book. I don't know how far funny takes us. Is funny alone enough to make a book great?Insistent Appellation: Everyone at Cold Comfort refers to Flora as "Robert Poste's child." Eventually she's forced to call herself that, as Aunt Ada doesn't know her by any other name. So, if we accept that the book is mainly aiming for the funny bone, where does that get us with Dowland's original challenge? What is it that helps it stand alone? There's the fact that the laughs keep coming, I suppose, although I have to admit I laughed far less later in the book, after I had grown more used to the gloriously extravagant style and the story was starting to seem more like a homage to Jane Austen than a jab at DH Lawrence.

The closest any dramatisation has come to capturing her philosophy was probably the BBC Radio 4 version. Sometimes radio has better pictures, because you create the visuals yourself. As always I enjoyed the ‘Inquisitor clues’ and was happy to be led round the grid in a particular way according to what clues I could solve. I ended with the six words in the 7 x 3 sector that included SCRAWNY, NEWCOME and the two blank cells.

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Essentially this is the American tv series, the Hillbillies rewritten for 1930s Sussex and parodying Hardy, Lawrence, and various other Great British Writers, but is more related to the Hillbillies with incest, hellfire, strange obsessions (cows) and all manner of people who all have mental or emotional problems of the darker, more malign sort. After that (about the first 10% of the book), I could not have cared less. The book has all sorts of characters, but I didn’t connect with any of them.

It originated in Cold Comfort Farm (1932), a parody of contemporary novels about rural life, by the English author Stella Gibbons (1902-89). As Robert Allen explains in Dictionary of English Phrases (Penguin Books – 2006), this novel tells the story of a cheerful young heroine, Flora Poste, who visits her cousins in a dreary Sussex farmhouse dominated by Aunt Ada Doom, who had a traumatic experience in her childhood, as she keeps reminding everyone including herself. Exactly what this experience was, or whether it occurred at all, is left to the reader’s imagination, but Aunt Ada exploits it ruthlessly to feign her madness and as a pretext for demanding constant attention from the family around her. These are extracts from Cold Comfort Farm: The book inspired Mellon family heiress Cordelia Scaife May to name her home "Cold Comfort", and to name her philanthropic foundation Colcom Foundation. [20] Critical reception [ edit ] From its opening line – “The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged” – to Aunt Ada’s celebrated recollection of “something nasty in the woodshed”, Cold Comfort Farm has the air of a novel written, as it were, in one joyous exhalation, according to Gibbons, somewhere between Lyons Corner House and Boulogne-sur-Mer during the year spanning 1931/32. What is strange about this is that the question in this very depressed, subdued poem is couched in terms provided by a flagrantly comic novel of the period. Cold Comfort Farm, published by Stella Gibbons in 1932, is the story of the orphaned Flora Poste's stay with her relatives the Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm in Howling, Sussex. The novel relates Flora's attempts to help the inhabitants of this strange outpost of madness in the heart of the English countryside become just slightly less eccentric.

Cold Comfort Farm has been an excellent choice for this month's Reading Group. It's provided - forgive me - fertile ground for discussion about the art of parody, transcending parody and race and class in the 1930s. Less seriously, but probably more importantly, it's also been highly entertaining and extremely funny: just the book to see us through the darkest month. I'm glad it came out of the hat – and I'm grateful to the readers who nominated it. The reason why CCF has survived so well is that it's a splendid book in its own right. You really don't need to know Lawrence or Webb's work to enjoy the book, since the characters and dialogue are so good. It's a bit like Three Men in a Boat or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the works they make fun of are mostly forgotten now, but the work stands on its own … A wonderful novel, possibly the only modern classic I will ever fully enjoy. Not a comedy but a satire, but done with a love for pastoral classical writing that I think the author felt slightly embarrassed by. Think of Austen's Emma and you have the protagonist, Flora. Think of Bertha Mason of Thornfield Hall and you have Aunt Ada Doom, but each pulled and twisted to become extremes. There are smatterings of Heathcliffe, Bathsheba, and all the other archetypes of Classical Literature. Great writing, though often too short and blunt (though we can blame my love of lengthy Victorian prose for this). Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (actually a collection of short stories, of which Christmas was the first) was published in 1940. It is a prequel of sorts, set before Flora's arrival at the farm, and is a parody of a typical family Christmas. [13]