Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics)

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Amos's half-cousins: Mica, married to Susan; Urk, who expects to marry Elfine and is devoted to water-voles; Ezra, married to Jane; Caraway, married to Lettie; Harkaway Cultural Stereotypes. It may be a sophisticated parody of rural tradition novels but let's face it, the novel gets most of its lulz from one of the world's most ancient brands of humour: laughing at farmers. As parody of the "loam and lovechild" genre, Cold Comfort Farm alludes specifically to a number of novels both in the past and contemporarily in vogue when Gibbons was writing. According to Faye Hammill's "Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars", the works of Sheila Kaye-Smith and Mary Webb are the chief influence: [3] she considered that the farm is modelled on Dormer House in Webb's The House in Dormer Forest, and Aunt Ada Doom on Mrs. Velindre in the same book. [3] The farm-obsessed Reuben's original is in Kaye-Smith's Sussex Gorse, and the Quivering Brethren on the Colgate Brethren in Kaye-Smith's Susan Spray. [3] Others see John Cowper Powys's rural mysticism as a further target, as featured in his Wessex novel Wolf Solent (1929): "He felt as if he enjoyed at that hour some primitive life-feeling that was identical with what those pollarded elms felt." [4] Nineteen year old Flora Poste, freshly orphaned and impossibly jaunty, decides to live with strange, barely civilized relatives in rural Sussex. The Starkadders are a mix of fire and brimstone religiosity, untrammeled sexual urges, pathological family ties, feigned mental illness, and general slovenliness. Cold Comfort Farm is a 1932 parody of Thomas Hardy, the Brontës, and D.H. Lawrence, with themes of Pygmalion and the meddling of Emma Woodhouse thrown in, and jabs at Eugene O'Neill, avant garde film, and Freud. It's kind of a hot mess, actually. The most flattering thing that can be said about it is that it's clever, for example, in this passage taking aim at Lawrence:

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.

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arts Australia & New Zealand etymology French/English linguistics literature media music public affairs religion symbolisms United Kingdom & Ireland USA & Canada Main Tags animals Australia Christianity dictionaries drinks economics food human body Ireland judicial Latin military newspapers & magazines phrases politics slang sports & games theatre United Kingdom USA links This is a very funny book. I don't know how far funny takes us. Is funny alone enough to make a book great?

Reference to Cold Comfort Farm usually triggers the famous quote that there was ‘something nasty in the woodshed’. Aunt Ada Doom claims to have seen it when she was ‘no bigger than a titty wren’. Gibbons would never reveal what the ‘something nasty’ was; but it represents childhood trauma, whether real or imagined, and the way its ‘victims’ use it to excuse their behaviour. Pearce, H. (2008) "Sheila's Response to Cold Comfort Farm", The Gleam: Journal of the Sheila Kaye-Smith Society, No 21. This was my first Inquisitor by Augeas, and it followed a few days after solving a puzzle by Augeas elsewhere.What strange times – more consuming than Brexit, but at least that had its exciting moments. (I haven’t started last week’s puzzle from Ifor so I would appreciate it if there were no references to it in any comments that land here. Thanks.) Miss Stella Gibbons’s novel has been most favourably reviewed. It is a well-sustained parody of the Loam-and-Love-child school of fiction. Technobabble: A rare non-SF version. Reuben suspects Flora of wanting to take over the farm, so his surly conversational opener with her is an attempt to intimidate her with his knowledge of farming: "I ha' scranleted four hundred furrows this morning down i' the bute." Flora has no idea what he’s talking about and can’t decide whether she should reply "Oh, you poor dear!" or "Come, that’s capital." Eventually she decides on a non-committal "Have you?" If you enjoyed Cold Comfort Farm you might like George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody, also available in Penguin Classics. 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.