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.

Plot summary

The heroine, Flora, stays at Aunt Ada Doom's isolated farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex. As is typical in a certain genre of romantic nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature, each of the farm's inhabitants has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred or fear, and the farm is badly run. Flora, being a level-headed, urban woman, applies modern common sense to their problems and helps them all adapt to the twentieth century.

Related Topics:
Sussex - Twentieth century

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The speech of the Sussex characters is a parody of rural dialects (in particular the Somerset accent - another parody of Mary Webb, whose characters all tended to speak with a Somerset accent despite the fact they more often than not lived in a completely different county) and is sprinkled with fake but authentic-sounding local vocabulary such as mollocking (Seth's favourite activity, undefined but invariably resulting in the pregnancy of a local maid), sukebind (a weed whose flowering in the Spring symbolises the quickening of sexual urges in man and beast; the word is presumably formed by analogy to 'woodbine' (honeysuckle) and bindweed) and clettering (an impractical method used by Adam for washing dishes, which involves scraping them with a dry twig).

Related Topics:
Somerset - Honeysuckle - Bindweed

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