I finally got round to reading this book, which has been on my wishlist for ages and my TBR ever since it was released in Australia as a Popular Penguin. This was a book that I seem to have known about forever, one whose memorable phrases bled into the vocabulary of our family because my parents had read it when they were young. It is a delicious satire of the British rural novel, lampooning Jane Austen’s marriage machinations; the doom-laden stories of Thomas Hardy; and the daft sexuality of D H Lawrence. The fact that these are three of my favourite authors makes the comedy all the more enjoyable. (Though I have to confess to having ‘grown out of’ Lawrence. I read and loved everything of his when I was a young woman, but like Tchaikovsky who is great when you want to wallow in your own adolescent misery, Lawrence is a taste best savoured in youth, IMO. It is too hard not to laugh in the wrong places once you reach ‘a certain age’.)
Anyway, Gibbons’ spoof is brilliant. Flora Poste, a socialite with no apparent means of support other than £100 per year, is a parasitic orphan who descends on her only living relations, the Starkadders, at the aptly-named Cold Comfort Farm because she does not care to get a job. Flora is forever fending off suitors who are in love with her, including Mr Mybug, who she identifies with a shudder as an author straight away. Mybug, who has come to the peace and quiet of the rural lifestyle to write, is working on a book about how the Brontë sisters passed off their brother Branwell’s stories as their own – because no woman could possibly have written Wuthering Heights.
Flora’s central amusement is to interfere in situations which take her interest. There is nothing worse, for Flora, than things being boring.
The Starkadders – since they are eccentric bunch of characters – are not boring at all. They include:
- Aunt Ada Doom who keeps to her room, long bemoaning that she saw something narsty in the woodshed and bullying the rest of the family into staying right where they are because there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort;
- Old Adam, a part-time fire-and-brimstone preacher, who has named his cows Pointless, Graceless, Aimless and Feckless;
- Seth – think smouldering sexuality
- Judith, who is obsessed by her son Seth, and curtains the innumerable photos she has of him with black cloth when he goes away to be a movie star (oops, sorry, spoiler);
- Elfine, who is, yes, an Elfin child given to swanning about in the fields and has an affinity with all God’s creatures; and
- Reuben, whose ambition to run the farm is stymied by tradition and inertia.
There are also some wives, but they are not allowed to live at the farm, by order of Aunt Ada Doom.
Clearly this lot are a challenge, but Flora is up for it, and in no time at all there is an Austenesque Happy Ending, culminating in Flora finding her Own True Love as well.
Somewhere on the shelves I think I have Here Be Dragons as well, but a preliminary browse has been inconclusive. Perhaps it will turn up as I continue to work on the G shelf (which has burst its banks thanks to some new (old) titles by Patricia Grace)…
PS The introduction by Lynne Truss is inane.
Author: Stella Gibbons
Title: Cold Comfort Farm
Publisher: Penguin, Popular Penguins series, 2006, first published in 1932
ISBN: 9780141045481
Source: Personal library, purchased at Readings, $12.95
Availability
Fishpond: Cold Comfort Farm (Popular Penguins)
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
I read this with the Guardian online Reading Group a year or so ago. Fun because we had read Lawrence earlier that year. But I borrowed a film version from the library and was disappointed, only because the characters in my own mind were much more colourful and eccentric.
LikeLike
By: roughghosts on January 23, 2015
at 1:06 pm
Yes, I noticed at GoodReads that they’d made a film of it. I’m in two minds about that as well.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on January 23, 2015
at 4:18 pm
Long time since I read it. “Seeing something nasty in the woodshed” seems very familiar
LikeLike
By: Carrie on January 23, 2015
at 4:33 pm
Yes, it’s come to mean all kinds of things, I suspect!
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on January 23, 2015
at 4:55 pm
This sounds like a lot of fun. It’s a book I’ve been aware of forever but never read. I might have to remedy that…Aunt Ada Doom, great name!
LikeLike
By: JacquiWine on January 23, 2015
at 7:57 pm
There, you see, you have it in your memory banks too. It seems to be a book that made its way into English popular culture and was passed down through generations, even though we younger ones hadn’t read it.
I am waiting to see if one of my US readers was aware of this book too, or if it never made it across the Atlantic…
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on January 23, 2015
at 9:08 pm
I have this in my pile along with a host of other titles by the author, including Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, which the publisher kindly sent me many years ago when it reprinted them in the Vintage livery. Must dig this one out — it sounds like a riot.
LikeLike
By: kimbofo on January 24, 2015
at 1:08 am
Oh I’m so glad to see others who enjoyed the book – it just warmed my heart and had me giggling. Your review was great and brought back some nice memories.
LikeLike
By: beckylindroos on January 24, 2015
at 4:01 am
This has been on my TBR (virtual, anyhow) for a long time too. One day. It sounds like it would be a delightful interlude between other books.
LikeLike
By: whisperinggums on January 24, 2015
at 10:24 pm
Interesting, isn’t it, how books lurk in the background of the mind? Some, I know how they got there, but others are books that I just know of, want to read, but can’t remember how I came to know about them.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on January 25, 2015
at 11:23 am
Yes, same here … I wish I always could remember the origin, particularly if someone recommended it and I finally read and liked it!
LikeLike
By: whisperinggums on January 25, 2015
at 2:25 pm
I love this book so much. I read it alongside ‘Love in a Cold Climate’ because I’d long confused the two and needed to straighten things out. And that was how I discovered two of the funniest books ever.
LikeLike
By: Jane Bryony Rawson on January 25, 2015
at 8:43 am
Ah, Love in a Cold Climate is on my wishlist, I do love British satire. If there is any other country that does it so well, I have yet to find it.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on January 25, 2015
at 11:28 am
We had quite a family mania with “something nasty in the woodshed” and this was a favourite with all of us, one that doesn’t disappoint on second reading, as so often happens with childhood favourites. At the same time we came across a book called “Search your soul, Eustace” which is about the Victorian religious novel, but I’ve always associated the two for their lush and lurid prose.
LikeLike
By: gertloveday on January 27, 2015
at 12:21 pm
Eustace! Now there’s a name that should never have been allowed to fall from favour. Perhaps if I ever have a grandchild…
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on January 27, 2015
at 12:22 pm
There wouldn’t be too many of them around…at least for a while. I’m still waiting for Alf, Bert, Aggie and Beryl to make a comeback.
I always thought that if I had twins I’d call them Xenophon and Xenobia. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I never did. So feel free to suggest them if you ever do have a grandchild.
LikeLike
By: gertloveday on January 27, 2015
at 1:14 pm
LOL My father is a fan of Aldous Huxley … but he had three daughters…
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on January 27, 2015
at 1:26 pm
Such a familiar title and another not read, well done for getting to it!
LikeLike
By: Claire 'Word by Word' on January 28, 2015
at 7:51 am
Thanks for the RT on Twitter, Claire:)
LikeLiked by 1 person
By: Lisa Hill on January 28, 2015
at 8:03 am