Following the death of her parents, the book's heroine, Flora Poste, finds she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She decides to take advantage of the fact that "no limits are set, either by society or one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose on one's relatives", and settles on visiting her distant relatives at the isolated Cold Comfort Farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex. The inhabitants of the farm – Aunt Ada Doom, the Starkadders, and their extended family and workers – feel obliged to take her in to atone for an unspecified wrong once done to her father. Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb. That's just as it should be. Gibbons is an expert at the devious hint, the suggestive elision. Our minds boggle all the more for being left to their own devices. 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.

And so upon this menagerie of freaks, Flora Poste who is their blood relative arrives for a prolonged visit. Nothing seems to phase her, nothing gets her down, and we’ll see what magic she can work to get that farm and its inhabitants in better shape. is an ingenious thriller based on the type of man who lives by marrying middle-aged, lonely women by private means, getting rid of them, and trying again. The Penguin Classics edition of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm is introduced by Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

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Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Parodied with Seth, who knows he's this but who isn't really all that interested in having the local girls swoon over him. It's because he's a secret movie buff whose dream is to be a Hollywood film star. Flora makes it happen. There is probably much to be said for such an explanation. But, when this linguistic moment is set alongside other similarly outré, bizarre or counter-logical notes, such as those I briefly described earlier, which sound in Auden's poems of 1939, then it seems right to add that some other point – a point about poetry itself – is being made simultaneously with a point about the psyche. In the year when the Second World War began, Auden's poetry keeps returning in varying fashions to this 'monstrous' mode of yoking dissimilarities (Yeats and the Duke of Wellington, Toller and Aunt Ada) violently together without attempting to synthesize or harmonize the dissonances. Preamble: Solvers should fill the blank cells, then highlight someone, and what (cryptically) she saw (30 cells). One answer is an abbreviation.

In 1968 a television serial was made, dramatised by David Turner in three 45 minute episodes. It starred Alastair Sim as Amos, Fay Compton as Aunt Ada, Sarah Badel as Flora Poste, Rosalie Crutchley as Judith, Brian Blessed as Reuben and Peter Egan as Seth. [15] Joan Bakewell was the narrator. This BBC adaptation was released on VHS but as of April 2014 is no longer available commercially, but can be seen on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AP0t3hUQKo. Well, perhaps she likes it better that way,’ said Flora, soothingly. She had been observing Aunt Ada’s firm chin, clear eyes, tight little mouth and close grip upon the ‘Milk Producers’ Weekly Bulletin and Cowkeepers’ Guide’, and she came to the conclusion that if Aunt Ada was mad, then she, Flora, was one of the Marx Brothers. From its opening line – “The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged” – to Aunt Ada’s celebrated recollection of “something nasty in the woodshed”, Cold Comfort Farm has the air of a novel written, as it were, in one joyous exhalation, according to Gibbons, somewhere between Lyons Corner House and Boulogne-sur-Mer during the year spanning 1931/32. 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]

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Soon the grid was filled, apart from the two barred-off cells. Time to put it away for today – my first ever video conference is at 09:00 tomorrow and I need to do some prep. Hidden Depths: Urk The Pigpen turns out to be a good stepfather to Mariam's hitherto unwanted love children. Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Flora counts "Seth" and "Reuben" among these. You'll never guess what her cousins are called. 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.)

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. Crusty Caretaker: Adam, a relative of the Starkadders who works as their hired man and who is prone to muttering vague warnings and upholding obscure traditions. I liked the succinctness of the preamble and the relatively unusual symmetry by reflection rather than by rotation, which wuited the them perfectly. I guessed that the placement of the thematic items would complement the grid design.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. Following on from my earlier post, I now have my twelfth and final, personal Desert Island Book.If I am ever pressed to nominate my favourite book of all time, this is my choice. The book is Cold Comfort Farmby Stella Gibbons.