Cold Comfort Farm

Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticized, doom-laden accounts of rural life in some novels. The most immediate model was the work of Mary Webb. Gibbons was working for the Evening Standard in 1928 when they decided to serialise Webb's first novel, The Golden Arrow, and had the job of summarising the plot of earlier instalments. More talented novelists in the tradition parodied by Cold Comfort Farm are D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy; and going further back, the Brontë sisters.

Characters, in order of appearance

In London:

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• Flora Poste: the heroine, a nineteen-year old orphan from London.
• Mary Smiling: a widow, Flora's friend in London.
• Charles Fairford: Flora's cousin in London, studying to become a parson.

In Howling, Sussex:

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• Judith Starkadder: Flora's cousin, wife of Amos. She has an unhealthy passion for her own son Seth.
• Seth Starkadder: younger son of Amos and Judith. Handsome and over-sexed.
• Ada Doom: Judith's mother, a reclusive, miserly widow, owner of the farm, who constantly complains of having "seen something nasty in the woodshed" when she was a girl.
• Adam Lambsbreath: ancient farm hand.
• Mark Dolour: farm hand.
• Amos Starkadder: Judith's husband, and hellfire preacher at the Church of the Quivering Brethren. ("Ye're all damned!")
• Micah, married to Susan; Urk, a bachelor who wants to marry Elfine; Ezra, married to Jane; Caraway, married to Lettie; Harkaway: Amos's half-cousins.
• Luke, married to Prue; Mark, divorced from Susan and married to Pheobe: Amos's half-brothers.
• Reuben Starkadder: Amos's heir, moody and jealous of anyone who stands between him and his inheritance of the farm.
• Meriam Beetle: hired girl, and mother of Seth's four children.
• Elfine: an outdoor-loving girl of the Starkadder family, who is besotted with the local squire, Dick Hawk-Monitor of Hautcouture Hall.
• Mrs Beetle.
• Mrs Murther: landlady of The Condemn'd Man public house.
• Mr Meyerbug: a writer who is in love with Flora. His is working on a thesis that the works of the Brontë sisters were written by their brother Branwell Brontë.
• Rennet: unwanted daughter of Susan and Mark
• Dr Müdel: psychoanalyst.

The interrelations of the characters are complex. The family tree below is an attempt to illustrate them as they stand at the end of the novel.

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