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Stella Gibbons' novel is a wickedly funny portrait of British rural life in the 1930s. Flora, a recently orphaned socialite, moves in with her country relatives, the gloomy Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm.
Stella Dorothea Gibbons, novelist, poet and short-story writer, was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard.
Her first publication was a book of poems The Mountain Beast (1930) and her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) won the Femina Vie Heuruse Prize for 1933. Amongst her other novels are Miss Linsey and Pa (1936), Nightingale Wood (1938), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Beside the Pearly Water (1954). Her Collected Poems appeared in 1950.
In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb, who died in 1959. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
59 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Satirical, Sardonic look at the English Novel in Cold Comfort Farm,
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This review is from: Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Mass Market Paperback)
Every now and then, usually when life gets a bit too stressful, I need a good belly laugh. And if an author can do it in a clever fashion, then all the better. Such was the case with Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm.
Written in 1932, and set in "the near future," it's the story of the Starkadder family and what happens when they have a run in with the determined Flora Poste. Flora is one of those heroines who is decidedly cheerful, and very intent on fixing up other peoples messes and untidiness. Forced with the decision to either throw herself on the mercy of some relations goodwill to take her in, or (horrors!) get a job, Flora writes to the various relations that she has in search of a home after the demise of her parents. In exchange, Flora will hand over her slight inheritance of a hundred pounds a year. And it seems the only relations who do want her are the Starkadders, off in the downs of Sussex. Flora is imagining a tidy home farm. What she gets is a set of cranky, eccentric if not outright insane, cousins, with the ringleader, Aunt Ada Doom in the middle of it all. There is the son of Ada, Amos Starkadder, who runs the farm, but spends Tuesday nights off preaching fire and brimstone to the Brethren; his wife Judith who worships her youngest and views the world as perpetual misery and just wishes that everyone would leave her alone. Pretty Elfine, all of seventeen, spends her days running wild and imagining herself a dryad, twigs and leaves included. And then there are the boys, most notably, Reuben, who loves farming, but Amos doesn't trust him, and Seth, an oversexed, hunk of manhood who seems to have nothing but sex on the brain, but the reality is much more interesting. And then the ancient, muttering Adam, who 'cletters' the dishes with thorny twigs. In short, Flora has all sorts of interesting projects at hand, and it's a task that she falls to with glee with great practicality and not a little cunning on her part. It's a mad riot of a novel, generously slathered with wicked parodies of the overwrought prose of D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, asides to the writing of Gaskell and a great withering jab at the Brontes. For anyone who has survived a university level course in nineteenth century English lit, it's the perfect antidote to the general depression that follows such a course, and it's worth it. Asute readers will note that Flora blithely goes about her mission of improving everyone's lives and being a dreadful snob about it. It takes a little while to realize that Gibbons is making fun of her heroine just as much as she is of the popular novels of the time. Flora never quite seems to see the chaos that she is spreading about in her wake as she goes about her tidying, and assumes that she is 'doing the right thing.' From the names of the farm's herd of cows -- Aimless, Feckless, Graceless and Pointless and the stud bull, Big Business -- to the real intent and mystery of Aunt Ada, who saw something nasty in the woodshed, it's a grand read of a book. You'll find yourself giggling over the descriptions, the sly wit, and the oft-times ridiculous situations that arise in this tale of a tormented family. I enjoyed myself immensely, and found it vastly entertaining and worth it to mend the blues for an evening. It's not a very long book, just under 240 pages, and if you can, find the new release from Penguin Books, with a new introduction by Lynne Truss, and a delightful cover by artist Roz Chast. There have been several film versions of this one made, most notably with Kate Beckensale as Flora, and I urge anyone who hasn't read the book to do so. You'll never look at English Literature in quite the same way again.
35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable - but not the original text,
By
This review is from: Cold Comfort Farm (Abridged Edition) (Paperback)
I read the book as part of a book club. We all found it amusing and entertaining. Be warned - this is not the same text as originally published. I ordered this edition because it would ship sooner than others which appeared higher on the sort list. While the story arc is the same, and the characters as quirky, it became apparent that my version misses a lot of the descriptive prose my friend all read. Skip this edition and get the full deal.
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Horrible Edition!!,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Cold Comfort Farm (Abridged Edition) (Paperback)
Do NOT waste your time with this edition. As another review has stated, this edition (ironically, the only edition Amazon includes for Amazon Prime shipping) is NOT the original text, and the "translation," the "der....I can't handle British English...huh huh...." American translation, is offensive in its juvenile and lowest-common-denominator approach to this novel. So much has been changed that it's hardly the same work at all. When comparing this edition with the Penguin text side-by-side, I cannot follow the story line from page to page - that's a drastic change! Even the "glossary" in the back questions the reader's intelligence (do I really need to be told the definition for "beetle" and that in Sussex the word "nay" means "no?"). Somehow the editor/butcher has managed to turn a 233 page text into 117, obviously showing some major cutting to the descriptions that make Cold Comfort Farm a wonderful book. There are 23 chapters to the original text; this edition has only 11 SHORT chapters - how is it even possible to call this the same book??
One would think that Amazon's description would at least mention that this is not Stella Gibbons' original work but some sort of adaptation. There is a brief mention that "Anne Massey's skillful rendering of a variety of accents will make this story more accessible to American audiences;" however, let me point out that the change of "accents" (ahem...dialect, people...we're talking about a stylistic choice made by the writer to include the dialect!) is not the most drastic change to the book - huge chunks have been taken out, and the syntax of practically every sentence has been changed into a style unrecognizable in relation to the author. Hell, entire paragraphs are unrecognizable when compared to the original text. It's almost like someone tried to turn a novel into a children's book! The publishing company should remove Gibbons' name from the cover and replace it with the BNPublishing logo, or at the very least say something on the cover about the book being some kind of adaptation of the original novel. Unfortunately, I did not see the statement on the back of the book about Massey's rendering of the accents, or I would have had an early warning that this was the wrong edition; however, as I started reading the book, I knew something was wrong - how could this be on a PhD English course syllabus?? Haha...thank goodness I have experience with 20th Century British literature so that I caught my mistake within my reading two pages! Well, I'm thankful Barnes and Noble could supply me with the Penguin edition on short notice so that I would not embarrass myself in class! MAKE SURE YOU SPECIFICALLY SEARCH FOR AND BUY THE PENGUIN CLASSICS EDITION!
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