Comfort and joy

      

     I began the reading year with an old favourite, and despite first loving it years ago and having read it several times, it didn't disappoint. Stella Gibbons's comic classic, Cold Comfort Farm, was first published in 1932 and set in "the near future". It tells the story of orphaned Flora Poste who, without home and means, must go and live with her eccentric cousins on their ramshackle, gloomy Sussex farm. It is prefaced by a line from Mansfield Park: "Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery", and Stella Gibbons follows that advice with her confection of a story.

    Flora is a bright, purposeful young woman who, before she leaves London for the country, "dined quietly with intelligent men: a way of passing the evening which she adored" [a girl after my own heart!]. Intent on tidying up the farm and its numerous inhabitants, she sets to work to bring purpose and meaning to the lives of her extraordinary relations with delightful and romantic results.

    The book pokes fun at the likes of D.H. Lawrence and 'earthy', rural novels, parodying the genre in marvellously gothic style. Flora's cousin Seth, brooding and magnificent, is destined for a career far from the muddy fields; as he stands in the kitchen, "the firelight lit up his diaphragm muscles as they heaved slowly in rough rhythm with the porridge". Who could resist? There's the homespun 'dryad' Elphine who must be polished up if she's to get her man, Amos the itinerant preacher, off round the country "in one o' they Ford vans" to save souls, and great aunt Ada Doom who famously "saw something nasty in the woodshed". One by one, Flora sets them to rights before sorting out her own future, most satisfactorily.

     If you don't already know this book, do try it, -  I'm glad to see that the cover of the current edition is rather more attractive than that of my ancient one!

Comments

[Simon]

Love this novel :) Oddly, though, I don't think I've read any of the rural/rustic novels it satires. Still works, though.

[Peter the flautist]

Yes I love this book too, and I thought the BBC TV adaption was pretty faithful to the original. Dark Puss also agrees wholeheartedly with the concept of dining quietly with intellegent [wo]men. Gibbons wrote many other books including volumes of poetry, but in this respect I think she has become more or less invisible. Have you read any of her other work?

[Rebecca]

I really must obtain a copy, I have never read this book, despite knowing the story well, off to do some virtual book shopping...

[rosie]

We've got the same edition as each other (that very 70s artwork)! Mine was a present from my Dad, who (corrcectly) thought it would cheer me up on a wet, gloomy, revising for exams weekend.

[Vivienne]

I have to boast a little and say that mine is a 1930s Penguin with a dustwrapper that I found for 50p at a school jumble sale. It has always been one of my favourite books, and was a useful corrective when I was a teenager living in extreme rural isolation, rather too inclined to drift off into the woods to Think Deep Thoughts. Fortunately I decided that I would rather be Flora than Elfine, and began to laugh at myself.

[Harriet]

I haven't read this for years but am encouraged to do so now. I always believed it was a parody of Mary Webb's Precious Bane, but the Lawrence connection sounds right too.

[Peter the flautist]

Also influenced by T Hardy I am sure.

[Sarah]

I've loved this uproariously funny novel since I first read it. Flora's certainties, Mr Mybug's Bronte book, Aunt Ada's something nasty in the woodshed... your post makes me think a re-read is on the horizon.

It would be interesting to read some of Stella Gibbons other work, but it seems to be out of print and hard to find.

[Barbara]

One of my favourite books. D H Lawrence and Mary Webb have been mentioned. Sheila Kaye Smith was a big influence and hers are Sussex novels. If you read Green Apple Harvest, for instance, you find that Stella Gibbons hardly needed to exagerrate!