Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons (author)

Penguin Books, UK: 1994; 233pp

ISBN: 014018869X

Genres: classic, humour, realistic fiction

Issues: family, identity, relationships

advanced concepts

Flora Poste has just been orphaned by the parents she hardly knew. Expensively, athletically and lengthily educated, Flora finds herself with blessed with the sum of one hundred pounds a year and no property.Knowing very well that this is not nearly enough to allow her to live in London, she appeals to various eccentric relatives and eventually moves to Cold Comfort Farm.

It at once becomes apparent that there is much here that needs to be reorganised, something at which Flora excels, and that there are plenty of eccentric characters to use in the novel she plans to write at sixty. There is Judith, alone in her grief; Amos, fervent in his Godliness; the smouldering and over-sexed Seth; Elfine, who just needs a little polish; not to mention Great Aunt Ada Doom, who saw something nasty in the woodshed when she was a child and has never recovered from the experience. This is a stylishly crafted parody of the earthy, stereotyped and somewhat melodramatic novels that were in vogue at the time.

Now in its thirty-second print run, Cold Comfort Farm is one of those whimsically humerous tales that will appeal to the experienced reader.

A very decent filmic interpretation has been made by the BBC, starring Kate Beckinsale (Much Ado About Nothing) as Flora and the wonderful Joanna Lumley (Absolutely Fabulous) as her friend, Mrs Smiling.

Same Author: Conference at Cold Comfort Farm; The Shadow of a Sorcerer; The Snow Woman; Nightingale Wood