Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) [Paperback]

Stella Gibbons (Author), Roz Chast (Illustrator), Lynne Truss (Introduction)

Book Description

Release date: March 28, 2006

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.

• A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with French flaps, rough front, and luxurious packaging
• Features an introduction from Lynne Truss and cover illustrations by Roz Chast

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In Gibbons's classic tale, first published in 1932, a resourceful young heroine finds herself in the gloomy, overwrought world of a Hardy or Bronte novel and proceeds to organize everyone out of their romantic tragedies into the pleasures of normal life. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19, chooses to live with relatives at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex, where cows are named Feckless, Aimless, Pointless, and Graceless, and the proprietors, the dour Starkadder family, are tyrannized by Flora's mysterious aunt, who controls the household from a locked room. Flora's confident and clever management of an alarming cast of eccentrics is only half the pleasure of this novel. The other half is Gibbons's wicked sendup of romantic cliches, from the mad woman in the attic to the druidical peasants with their West Country accents and mystical herbs. Anne Massey's skillful rendering of a variety of accents will make this story more accessible to American audiences. Recommended for both literary and popular collections.
- Sharon Cumberland, Graduate Ctr., CUNY
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

? Quite simply one of the funniest satirical novels of the last century.?
?Nancy Pearl, NPR's "Morning Edition"

? Delicious . . . "Cold Comfort Farm" has the sunniness of a P. G. Wodehouse and the comic aplomb of Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop".?
?"The Independent" (London)

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics; (4th) edition (March 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143039598
• ISBN-13: 978-0143039594
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (142 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #114,527 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 50 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A "slapstick" novel of manners? September 3, 2003

By bensmomma VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Could there be such a thing as a "slapstick" novel of manners? This one might qualify, for its humour both witty and broad and its country-house setting.

Our highly-educated heroine Flora Poste, intelligent, witty, but fashion-addled, aimless, and seemingly shallow, descends on her rural relatives when her parents die leaving her penniless. Sharp parodies of rural England, the family includes, among others, an insane matriarch locked in her room, a love-mad and graceless granddaughter, a grandson who plays the same role among the maids that the bull does among the cows, an antique manservant who fails to notice when a cow's leg falls off. In short order Flora contrives to marry off the granddaughter to a local grandee, packs the grandson off to Hollywood, and generally manages things so craftily that everyone not only lives Happily Ever After but also does so with Good Manners and better haircuts.

The most winning feature of Gibbon's book (after the fact that it is hysterically funny) is that she skewers not only the conventions of the 1930s upper classes to which Flora belongs, but also the working class denizens of the farm. At first everyone seems faintly ridiculous but over time your affections for ALL these characters grows. By the end you are actually happy to see them all happily settled, and Flora no longer seems like a conniver but a clever and sympathetic heroine-more Elizabeth Bennet than Becky Sharpe. A very neat trick on the part of the author, and one well worth the discovering.

One miniscule note of caution: Gibbons, writing in the 1930s, sets her novel "in the near future," and adds a couple of futuristic features that confuse the casual reader-telephones with televisions in them so you can see the speaker, references to the "Anglo-Nicaraguan War" and the like. You may safely ignore them without diminishing the book.

75 of 78 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Satirical, Sardonic look at the English Novel in Cold Comfort Farm July 13, 2006

By Rebecca Huston

Format: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.

57 of 58 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable - but not the original text January 5, 2009

By K. R. French

Format: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.