The Starkadders – since they are eccentric bunch of characters – are not boring at all. There is nothing worse, for Flora, than things being boring. Flora is forever fending off suitors who are in love with her, including Mr Mybug, who she identifies with a shudder as an author straight away. Mybug, who has come to the peace and quiet of the rural lifestyle to write, is working on a book about how the Brontë sisters passed off their brother Branwell’s stories as their own – because no woman could possibly have written Wuthering Heights.įlora’s central amusement is to interfere in situations which take her interest. Flora Poste, a socialite with no apparent means of support other than £100 per year, is a parasitic orphan who descends on her only living relations, the Starkadders, at the aptly-named Cold Comfort Farm because she does not care to get a job. It is too hard not to laugh in the wrong places once you reach ‘a certain age’.)Īnyway, Gibbons’ spoof is brilliant.

I read and loved everything of his when I was a young woman, but like Tchaikovsky who is great when you want to wallow in your own adolescent misery, Lawrence is a taste best savoured in youth, IMO. (Though I have to confess to having ‘grown out of’ Lawrence. The fact that these are three of my favourite authors makes the comedy all the more enjoyable. It is a delicious satire of the British rural novel, lampooning Jane Austen’s marriage machinations the doom-laden stories of Thomas Hardy and the daft sexuality of D H Lawrence. This was a book that I seem to have known about forever, one whose memorable phrases bled into the vocabulary of our family because my parents had read it when they were young.

I finally got round to reading this book, which has been on my wishlist for ages and my TBR ever since it was released in Australia as a Popular Penguin.

Cold comfort farm by stella gibbons