Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics)

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In 1942, the English author Lucy Beatrice Malleson (1899-1973), who wrote detective stories under the pen name of Anthony Gilbert, published Something Nasty in the Woodshed, of which the Evening Chronicle (Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland) of Saturday 28 th March 1942 said that it Minutes into the Future: Yes, oddly, the novel is actually set in a projected future with videophones and references to the "Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of '46". This aspect has little impact on the plot and is easy to forget - but it's probably why Flora's love interest has his own plane. Flora, a bit. In the novel she can come off as a snobbish, shallow girl out to mooch off her relatives rather than support herself, and she seems to regard the Starkadders as if they were a science experiment. In the film she starts out a bit like this, but by the end she's genuinely invested in the Starkadders' happiness as people, not as a project. Into this maelstrom of petty evil, fear and ineptness, come the heroine. Flora Poste is the posh city cousin fallen on hard times whose father the Starkadders did something unmentionable to and feel guilty about so when she has nowhere to go, they take her in. But not willingly. She sorts them all out and brings them from their ignorant, Gothic-y insular life into the modern world. Adam Lambsbreath, the ninety-year-old farmhand, meets Flora at the station. He tells Flora that a curse on Cold Comfort Farm prevents it from flourishing and any of the family from leaving. Flora suspects, however, that Mrs. Ada Doom Starkadder, her deceased mother’s sister, is the real curse. Aunt Ada Doom stays in her room and rules the family with a will of iron. She has not left the farm in twenty years. Appalled by the condition of the farm and by the many violent and brooding Starkadders, Flora determines to tidy up life at Cold Comfort Farm.

Upper-Class Twit: Richard Hawk-Monitor, but he's a benign version: Flora dismisses Adam's fears that he intends to seduce and abandon Elfine with the consideration that, "Like most other ideas, the idea would simply not have entered his head." What is strange about this is that the question in this very depressed, subdued poem is couched in terms provided by a flagrantly comic novel of the period. Cold Comfort Farm, published by Stella Gibbons in 1932, is the story of the orphaned Flora Poste's stay with her relatives the Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm in Howling, Sussex. The novel relates Flora's attempts to help the inhabitants of this strange outpost of madness in the heart of the English countryside become just slightly less eccentric.When I have found a relative who is willing to have me, I shall take him or her in hand, and alter his or her character and mode of living to suit my own taste”. Woolf was – not for the first time – quite wrong. Of the winners of the Prix Étranger from this interwar period, only two are remembered in 2011 – the other is her own To the Lighthouse – and only one, Cold Comfort Farm, can claim to have introduced a phrase to our everyday language: when people talk of having seen "something nasty in the woodshed", they're referencing, whether they know it or not, the Starkadder family's presiding recluse, Aunt Ada Doom, who was driven mad by just such a vision as a child. As expressions go, I personally find this one exceedingly useful. There is probably much to be said for such an explanation. But, when this linguistic moment is set alongside other similarly outré, bizarre or counter-logical notes, such as those I briefly described earlier, which sound in Auden's poems of 1939, then it seems right to add that some other point – a point about poetry itself – is being made simultaneously with a point about the psyche. In the year when the Second World War began, Auden's poetry keeps returning in varying fashions to this 'monstrous' mode of yoking dissimilarities (Yeats and the Duke of Wellington, Toller and Aunt Ada) violently together without attempting to synthesize or harmonize the dissonances.

As always I enjoyed the ‘Inquisitor clues’ and was happy to be led round the grid in a particular way according to what clues I could solve. I ended with the six words in the 7 x 3 sector that included SCRAWNY, NEWCOME and the two blank cells. Urk in the book doesn't even try to hide how eager he is for Elfine to come to age so he can ravish her, since he's been fixated on making her his bride since the night she was born. Thankfully, Flora steps in and arranges Elfine to be married to a boy closer to her age, and Urk (after some brief wailing) settles on Mariam the hired girl, who is just as eager to have him as he is to have her. The earliest instance of the phrase that I have found is from A London Newsletter, by ‘the Old Stager’, published in The Sphere (London) on Saturday 20 th January 1934: Stella Gibbons, who was born in the same year as Georgette Heyer and Stevie Smith, 1902, wrote more than 20 novels, and thought of herself as a poet. But she continues to be remembered, and in some quarters revered, for just one title, a jeu d’esprit that’s a brilliant parody of an inter-war genre of provincial, rural melodrama typified (at the high end) by DH Lawrence and, much lower down, by Mary Webb, author of titles such as Precious Bane and The Golden Arrow. Part of its immediate success was probably also due to the merciless contempt in which the young Gibbons (she was barely 30) held many generations of romantic/pastoral fiction. Or, indeed, the brisk way (with one, two or three asterisks) in which she humorously drew attention to the best bits in her narrative.

Insistent Appellation: Everyone at Cold Comfort refers to Flora as "Robert Poste's child." Eventually she's forced to call herself that, as Aunt Ada doesn't know her by any other name. Remember the New Guy?: In the book, Rennet is a main Starkadder family member and direct relation of Aunt Ada and Judith, yet is not mentioned to the reader until the Counting. Flora is not even surprised to learn of her existence the way she was to learn of the Starkadder hired hands' wives; Rennet is treated as having been around all along yet was never mentioned before this point... just in time for Mr. Mybug to fall out of love with Flora and fall for her instead. The novel tells the story of Margaret Steggles, a plain, bookish girl who finds a ration book on Hampstead Heath, a discovery that brings the dreaded Gerald Challis, his glamorous wife, Seraphina, and his spoilt daughter, Hebe, into her life. In some ways it is rather a strange book: Margaret, so stuffy and sometimes so snobby, is not always lovable, and Gibbons is straightforward, even brutal, about the marriage prospects of someone with her looks; there is also an episode involving a disabled child that modern readers will find jarring. But it contains two fantastic character studies: the self-absorbed and misogynistic Gerald, and Margaret's friend Hilda, a girl who can enjoy herself under pretty much any circumstances.

Mr Meyerburg (whom Flora thinks of as "Mr Mybug"): a writer who pursues Flora and insists that she only refuses him because she is sexually repressed; he is working on a thesis that the works of the Brontë sisters were written by their brother Branwell Brontë she writes to Elizabeth Bowen in 1932, that the esteemed Prix Etranger award has gone to someone named Stella Gibbons. "Who is she?" she asks. "What is this book?" This book garnered the Femina Vie Heureuses Prize Prize in 1933. Virginia Woolf was apparently miffed that she won the prize — she wrote to Elizabeth Bowen (another well-known English novelist) on May 16, 1934: I was enraged to see they gave the 40 pounds to Gibbons; still now you and Rosamund Lehmann can join in blaming her. Who is she? What is this book? And so you can’t buy your carpet.”Latin omne ignotum pro magnifico est means everything unknown is taken as grand; it is from Agricola, by the Roman historian Tacitus (circa 56-circa 120 AD).

Noodle Incident: The "something nasty in the woodshed", and the mysterious wrong done to Flora's father (the most we learn is that a goat was involved somehow), and what her "rights" are. Flora accuses Aunt Ada of more or less making up the woodshed story as leverage over her family. The only parts that I liked were Ada Doom was in her room, and the first portion of the book made me laugh out loud. word abroad. Aunt Ada Doom grows wilder. Soon Urk drags Meriam out the door, bellowing that since he lost Elfine he will take Meriam.Pearce, H. (2008) "Sheila's Response to Cold Comfort Farm", The Gleam: Journal of the Sheila Kaye-Smith Society, No 21. The part that I hate so much about Jane Austen novels is that the female characters tend to just sit around, doing nothing to improve their situations, usually complain about the male figures, and wait around to be rescued. a b c Hammill, Faye (2001). "Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars" (PDF). Modern Fiction Studies. 47 (4): 831–854. doi: 10.1353/mfs.2001.0086. JSTOR 26286499. S2CID 162211201. Miss Stella Gibbons’s novel has been most favourably reviewed. It is a well-sustained parody of the Loam-and-Love-child school of fiction.