Flora brings good sense, pragmatism, and new horizons. One by one she sorts out the tangled, brooding Starkadder clan: the messianic hellfire preacher Uncle Amos smouldering local sexpot Seth Seth's mother Judith, half-crazed with incestuous longings for him Elfine, a wayward 'child of nature' who roams the hills lisping poetry in a green cloak and a bad hairstyle and finally the iron-willed family matriarch Ada Doom, who deviously manipulates her entire brood with the emotional blackmail of relived childhood traumas (having seen 'something nasty in the woodshed'). Gibbons's novelistic debut tells how the self-possessed Flora Poste, orphaned at 19 by indifferent parents, decides to plant herself on her remote relatives the Starkadders, occupants of Cold Comfort Farm in darkest Sussex.įlora comes to Cold Comfort with a mission to bring order and happiness to their messy personal lives. Cold Comfort Farm was an assured, sophisticated, risque literary satire-scarcely the province of a young female editorial assistant on the ultra-respectable Lady magazine. When Cold Comfort Farm was first published in 1932, at least one reviewer was convinced that 'Stella Gibbons' must be a pseudonym for the male novelist Evelyn Waugh.
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