This delightfully droll comic novel follows the adventures of Flora Poste, a proper young lady of modern notions, who finds herself alone in the world at the death of her parents. Since she is not yet ready for marriage and not willing to sacrifice her time for mere money, she writes to all her family members seeking a suitable refuge.
The mysterious Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm are willing and able to take her in; Judith Starkadder’s letter of reply alludes darkly to Flora’s “rights” and to some wrong done to her late father long ago. The prospect is hardly inviting, but the free room and board is well within her means and will allow her to spend her tiny inheritance on visits to London rather than sustenance.
This arrangement allows the author to make both country and city customs the object of her gentle Horatian satire, and with each new character added to Flora’s experience, new targets arise. Even literature and literary writers come under scrutiny: the novel is appended to a fictional introductory letter that promises to mark especially fine examples of writing with asterisks—the passages so noted are all examples of purple prose.
Flora is an acolyte of the Higher Common Sense, and upon her arrival at Cold Comfort Farm she sees that she has come to a place direly in need of her ministrations. Cousin Judith is morose and clearly enamored of her second son, Seth, a ravishingly handsome young man whose only love is the movies.
His older brother Reuben, however, is a competent, born farmer, devoted to Cold Comfort and hostile to Flora at first, imagining that she has come to take the farm from him, although eventually he falls so far under her sway as to propose marriage as a way of keeping her on.
The father of Seth and Reuben is Amos Starkadder, an itinerant fire-and-brimstone preacher of the Quivering Brethren—the sermon Flora attends is a send-up of “low church” excess. The only young woman on the place is Elfine, who is in love with a local scion of the fox-hunting class, Dick Hawk-Monitor of Hautcouture Hall, but her poetry-writing ways and bohemian dress make her completely unacceptable in that proper world.
And ruling invisibly over the Starkadder clan is the ancient recluse Aunt Ada Doom—she who saw something nasty in the woodshed as a young girl and who has been banking on the emotional currency of that experience ever since.
Flora determines to tidy up all these problems at Cold Comfort Farm, bringing fulfillment to each of these characters, sometimes in unexpected but imaginative ways.
Related by a third-person omniscient narrator, this story achieves its comic effect by the combination of likable rustic yokels, mildly dysfunctional personalities, and urbane young people. The descriptions are vividly detailed, right down to the intoxicating sukebind flowers that drive young women to surrender to their passions.
The primary function of the plot and even the dialogue is to present new topics for the narrator’s satiric review; each is dispatched cleverly. The amusing dialogue is archly witty, and since the narrator comments on the disharmony between characters’ spoken words and their actual thoughts, readers can stay attuned to the deeper attitudes lurking beneath surface pleasantries.
Bibliography
Ariail, Jacqueline-Ann. “Cold Comfort from Stella Gibbons,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 9, no. 3 (1978): 63–73.
Hammill, Faye. “Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars,” Modern Fiction Studies 47, no. 4 (2001): 831–854.
Categories: British Literature, Comic Fiction, Literature, Novel Analysis
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