Elfine flits about the downs to escape the house and writes poetry.Īre innumerable cousins around too, with biblical names. He is besotted with the ‘movies’.Įlfine is their 17 year old waif-like daughter. Seth is their younger son – a swarthy, film-star handsome man with animal attraction and habits to match. Reuben is their elder son who does most of the work on the arm and is waiting jealously to inherit. Judith is in a perpetual state of overwhelming grief and consumed by an obsession with her son Seth.Īmos, the owner of the farm, is a lay-preacher who spends most of his time preaching hellfire to the locals Judith, (Flora’s cousin) who is married to Amos Starkadder. Thus, with no means of supporting herself (her education had been ‘expensive, athletic and prolonged’ with the result that she possessed ‘every art and grace save that of earning her own living’) she decides to go to live with her distant relatives, the Starkadders, at Cold Comfort Farm. She is somewhat of a literary ‘trope’, a young woman, left by the sudden death of parents ‘with £100 a year and no property’. Mrs smiling collects brassieres.įlora Poste is a determined young woman of 19 who loves organising people and getting her own way. They have modern haircuts and up to date taste in fashion. But it is also a parody of the ‘town’ novel – Flora and her friend Mrs Smiling shop, go ice-skating and to the cinema.
Break.’Ĭold Comfort Farm is a masterful parody of the type of rural novel written by Mary Webb et al and is a wonderful parody of life on a failing post WW1 farm in the Sussex Downs. His gaze was suddenly edged by a fleshy taint. Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins, like slow yeast.
His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. ‘*** The man’s big body, etched menacingly against the bleak light that stabbed in from the low windows, did not move. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.’ ‘** Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. Stella even marks her parodying passages, helpfully, with asterisks! She can in fact ‘do’ any style including the overblown stuff favoured by writers like Ethel M. She wrote many other novels but Cold Comfort Farm was her first and by far the most successful. Stella Gibbons trained as a journalist but thought of herself as a poet.
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