Elizabeth Janeway responded to the lush ruralism of Laurie Lee's memoir Cider with Rosie by suggesting an astringent counterblast might be found by "looking for an old copy of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm". [10] Characters [ edit ] Cold Comfort Farm is the amusing story of Flora Poste, a sensible young woman from London who goes to live with relatives in Sussex, the eccentric Starkadders. Flora, a bit. In the novel she can come off as a snobbish, shallow girl out to mooch off her relatives rather than support herself, and she seems to regard the Starkadders as if they were a science experiment. In the film she starts out a bit like this, but by the end she's genuinely invested in the Starkadders' happiness as people, not as a project. There were a number of times while reading that I laughed out loud. So so funny how those people living on the farm behaved and the interactions between them and Flora. I recommend this book for a light enjoyable read to get away from your cares of the world. Rule of Cool: The film contains an inspiring maxim from Jane Austen, "What a pleasant life might be had in this world by a handsome, sensible old lady of good fortune, blessed with a sound constitution and a firm will," which in fact is a quote from the novel, entertainingly misattributed by Malcolm Bradbury.

And presiding over the lot, the matriarch Aunt Ada Doom, who never leaves her bedroom, who threatens to go mad if any of her family should leave the farm, and who once “saw something nasty in the woodshed.” Pearce, H. (2008) "Sheila's Response to Cold Comfort Farm", The Gleam: Journal of the Sheila Kaye-Smith Society, No 21. Secondly, the cast of characters in this book are perfectly drawn, and every one is delightful, in their own peculiar way. Morose cousin Judith, over-sexed Seth, faux-hippy Elfine, fire-and-brimstone preacher Amos, Flora’s sensible friend Mrs Smiling who collects brassieres as a hobby, fecund maid Miriam; every one of them is pitch-perfect. Best of all is Aunt Ada Doom, who saw something nasty in the woodshed when she was a tiny tot, and has used the trauma as an excuse to rule the family with an iron fist ever since. After all, ‘ there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm,’and nothing can ever be allowed to change that, especially not Robert Poste’s child. The standoff between young but wily Flora and stubborn Great Aunt Ada is one of the greatest battle of wills ever written, and it is a joy to read. The book contains technological developments that Gibbons thought might have been invented by then, such as TV phones and air-taxis, so the novel has been compared to science fiction. [12] Prequel and Sequel [ edit ]Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking her cosy. Gibbons was a sworn enemy of the flatulent, the pompous and the excessively sentimental, and long after she ceased writing herself, she kept a commonplace book by her bed in which she recorded the literary crimes of others. In her lifetime, moreover, her fans included the very-far-from-cosy theatre critic Kenneth Tynan (it was his ambition to out Cold Comfort Farm on the stage), Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna Everage) and Noël Coward. In Westwood there is a character called Gerald Challis – a playwright whose self-regard could not be more painfully swollen if it contracted mumps – whom Gibbons based on a now largely forgotten writer, Charles Morgan. Morgan had made the mistake of once having argued that writers, even Shakespeare, did not require a sense of humour; Gibbons responded by making him the butt of all her best jokes. My favorite parts of the book are when Flora decides to give her wispy, poetry-loving cousin Elfine a makeover that improves her love life, and when Flora helps her cousin Seth become a movie star. Flora even comes up with the perfect way of dealing with her Aunt Ada, thanks to a well-timed Jane Austen quote. Urk in the book doesn't even try to hide how eager he is for Elfine to come to age so he can ravish her, since he's been fixated on making her his bride since the night she was born. Thankfully, Flora steps in and arranges Elfine to be married to a boy closer to her age, and Urk (after some brief wailing) settles on Mariam the hired girl, who is just as eager to have him as he is to have her.

Gibbons is a little too pleased with herself by the end, which goes on like the last scene in Star Wars. We still have questions. Did the goat live? Will anyone ever find Graceless's leg, which fell off and no one even noticed for half a day? The psychiatrist immediately recognises this situation, and I have been relying on Aunt Ada Doom for many years for an example of traumatic fallacy. Spread by post-war Hollywood, owing something to battle neurosis and more to psychoanalysis in the USA, the notion that all long-standing psychiatric symptoms must have been initiated by a traumatic incident in early childhood is so embedded in our culture that most patients, at least those with anxiety symptoms, take it for granted. Behind their distress, their language reveals the plea to find the ‘real’ cause, after which everything will magically improve. It may also relate to the depressive nature of some symptoms, that the sufferer is in some way bad in their essence, with their own original sin, and throws an emphasis on the past. It also reveals the passive and pessimistic nature of these patients, since the past cannot be changed. a b c Hammill, Faye (2001). "Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars" (PDF). Modern Fiction Studies. 47 (4): 831–854. doi: 10.1353/mfs.2001.0086. JSTOR 26286499. S2CID 162211201.Gibbons has enormous fun with sexy Seth, all panther-like grace and unbuttoned shirts; hellfire-preaching Amos, the family patriarch; put-upon Adam who washes up with a thorn twig while breaking his 80-year old heart over young Elfine; Elfine herself who roves the countryside, writing poems and acting suitably fey; and interloper Mr Mybug who can't help but see fecund sexuality in every leaf and bud. Pair the Spares: Every Cold Comfort Farm resident who isn't already married or has left the farm by Elfine's engagement ends up paired with each other. Urk settles for Mariam the hired girl, Flora's Abhorrent Admirer Mr. Mybug falls for Rennet the Old Maid, and in the book Reuban decides to wait a few years for his hired hand's teenage daughter Nancy to be old enough to marry. (In the film, Reuban gets together with Rennet, as Mr. Mybug is Adapted Out.) The Dramatization: The cast looks good on paper. Rosalie Crutchley is a perfect personification of Judith. Her burly son Reuben, who wants the farm from his father, is ably portrayed by Brian Blessed. Freddie Jones does a masterful job as the thoroughly disgusting Urk, as does Aubrey Morris as "Mr. Mybug." Peter Egan falls a little short as Seth, but he's good looking and a fine actor. What I admire most about Flora is her unwillingness to give in to the artistic fashion of celebrating the misery of the human condition. Rather than getting ensnared in the sukebind of life, she believes we must wield our scrantlets. "Nature," she says, "is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy." I was disappointed in the performances, which are too broad. The Starkadders are grotesques, but they need to be kept within bounds or they just look silly. There is so much ranting and raving in the first episode that it isn't so much funny as tiresome, especially by Billy Russell. Even Alastair Sim only gets into his stride during the sermon to the Quivering Brethren in part two. Sarah Badel is a bright and level-headed Flora, and Rosalie Crutchley makes a good Judith, but not enough to surpass the hint of madness in Eileen Atkins' eyes in the Schlesinger version.

Modern Classics are often written as an antithesis to the ridiculously long Classics, yet condensation is not always welcome. Gibbons does it very well here and with a humour that is both mild and forthcoming. It is a Modern Classic with no grudges except, perhaps, just a desire to be a little more to the point. 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 … Nowadays, with the world in a fairly nightmarish and chaotic state, I find myself desperate for tidiness and happy endings, and even more desperate for a laugh. Cold Comfort Farm provides all of this. And what a relief it is for those of us who have slogged through numerous earnest rural novels in which there are no laughs at all. It is not easy to keep up the laughs in a comic novel, right to the very end, but Gibbons did it. Her nephew and biographer, Reggie Oliver, reports that she also laughed while writing it, and when she took her chums out to lunch and read them the latest bit, they laughed like drains too, often annoying the restaurant proprietor. How I wish I could have been at those lunches. In 1930 a young journalist called Stella Gibbons started a new job on the Lady, "the magazine for gentlewomen", where she applied her versatility as a writer to every subject under the sun, bar cookery, which was the province of a certain Mrs Peel. Soon after her arrival, however, Gibbons also began work on another, more exciting project, a novel – her "masterpiece", she jokingly called it – which she planned to write in spare moments, in a little room at the end of a passage in the Lady's Covent Garden offices. The book was to be a take-off of the "loam and love child" novels then so popular: novels such as Mary Webb's Precious Bane and Sheila Kaye-Smith's Sussex Gorse, in which earthy and primitive types, gloomy happenings and archaic rural landscapes are depicted in prose so overwrought that to call it purple would be a wild understatement ("the kind of story in which peasants have babies in cowsheds and push each other down wells", as Punch put it). She intended to call it Cold Comfort Farm.

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But Flora loves nothing better than to organise other people. Armed with common sense and a strong will, she resolves to take each of the family in hand. A hilarious and ruthless parody of rural melodramas and purple prose,Cold Comfort Farmis one of the best-loved comic novels of all time. Woolf was – not for the first time – quite wrong. Of the winners of the Prix Étranger from this interwar period, only two are remembered in 2011 – the other is her own To the Lighthouse – and only one, Cold Comfort Farm, can claim to have introduced a phrase to our everyday language: when people talk of having seen "something nasty in the woodshed", they're referencing, whether they know it or not, the Starkadder family's presiding recluse, Aunt Ada Doom, who was driven mad by just such a vision as a child. As expressions go, I personally find this one exceedingly useful. The author, Stella Gibbons, had grown up among weird relations. When she was just eleven she had to talk her father out of committing suicide, and was astonished to realize that he was actually relishing their melodramatic conversation. Her family seemed partial to creating scenes, but with a clear thread of pretence running through their ‘performances’. Cold Comfort Farm is the perfect comfort read. It is a wonderful blend of British charm, comic characters, and a clever young woman at the heart of it all. Well, just kidding. All of my trying-to-move-in-and-permanently-inhabit-a-fictional-world energies are currently taken up by the film Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again (2018). I am really tryna become Lily James as a young Meryl Streep Donna. I am purely certain that I could handle the whole Sam situation much better and end up with him in the end but also still get with Harry and Bill in the interval.