“Why do I always do the WRONG THINGS? I don’t want to, I know it’s wrong, I think I shouldn’t do it, and then I DO! Can you help me, Mommy?” Mommy: “Are you going to tell me? Or is it a mystery to me?” Harriet: “No, we don’t even have one little shred of a memory of a banana left!” The book is also rife with made-up but realistic-sounding words (“sukebind” and “scranlet”) and telling parodic names and titles (“Elfine” and “Aunt Ada Doom”). Gibbons has a gift for recognizable description even when telling her most improbable tale: “Flora had also learned the degraded art of ‘tasting’ unread books…” (68) and “Like all true artists, thought Flora, he was unwilling to admit that he got no end of a kick out of his job” (90).

She also manages to finagle several marriages and some general improvements before her work at Cold Comfort Farm comes to a surprising and triumphant end in a run-in with the family curse and matriarch, the semi-mad Aunt Ada Doom. She convinces her elderly uncle Amos that he’s been called as an itinerant fire-and-brimstone preacher, and hooks her handsome but immoral cousin Seth up with a Hollywood producer. Flora takes on the task of removing the more difficult and improving the deserving among these relatives, with elaborate schemes engineered for each. The farm is dismal and overrun with various uncouth relatives, wildly caricatured but so aptly that we know what they will do next. When her parents die, young but practical Flora Poste heads out to Cold Comfort Farm in rural Sussex. It still functions effectively as a comic novel with the dark, semi-morbid sort of comedy for which the British have a renowned knack. I have read few books of the type, which makes it difficult to evaluate Cold Comfort Farm as a comic imitation. Lynne Truss’s introduction says, rightly I think, that many of the greatest novelists get their start writing parody. This book was written as a parody of a type of literature that is now mostly nonexistent: the rural Victorian melodrama. Cold Comfort Farm (1932).Ĭold Comfort Farm is Gibbons’ first and most famous novel. I’d like to go all sophisticated and say I loved it, but the truth is I’ve read several other novels of Gibbons that I’ve found much more enjoyable.

Novel cold comfort farm