Cold Comfort Farm


Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb.

Plot summary

Following the death of her parents, the book's heroine, Flora Poste, finds she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She decides to take advantage of the fact that "no limits are set, either by society or one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose on one's relatives", and settles on visiting her distant relatives at the isolated Cold Comfort Farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex. The inhabitants of the farm – Aunt Ada Doom, the Starkadders, and their extended family and workers – feel obliged to take her in to atone for an unspecified wrong once done to her father.
As is typical in a certain genre of romantic 19th-century and early 20th-century literature, each of the farm's inhabitants has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred, or fear, and the farm is badly run. Flora, being a level-headed, urban woman in the dandy tradition, determines that she must apply modern common sense to their problems and help them adapt to the 20th century – bringing metropolitan values into the sticks.

Inspirations

As parody of the "loam and lovechild" genre, Cold Comfort Farm alludes specifically to a number of novels both in the past and currently in vogue when Gibbons was writing. According to Faye Hammill's "Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars", the works of Sheila Kaye-Smith and Mary Webb are the chief influence: she considered that the farm is modelled on Dormer House in Webb's The House in Dormer Forest, and Aunt Ada Doom on Mrs. Velindre in the same book. The farm-obsessed Reuben's original is in Kaye-Smith's Sussex Gorse, and the Quivering Brethren on the Colgate Brethren in Kaye-Smith's Susan Spray. Others see John Cowper Powys's rural mysticism as a further target, as featured in his Wessex novel Wolf Solent : "He felt as if he enjoyed at that hour some primitive life-feeling that was identical with what those pollarded elms felt."

Sequels, responses, and influence

, often said to be one of the rural writers parodied by Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm, arguably gets her own back with a tongue-in-cheek reference to Cold Comfort Farm within a subplot of A Valiant Woman, set in a rapidly modernising village. Upper middle-class teenager, Lucia, turns from writing charming rural poems to a great Urban Proletarian Novel: "… all about people who aren't married going to bed in a Manchester slum and talking about the Means Test." Her philistine grandmother is dismayed: she prefers "cosy" rural novels, and knows Lucia is ignorant of proletarian life:
Elizabeth Janeway responded to the lush ruralism of Cider with Rosie by suggesting an astringent counterblast might be found by "looking for an old copy of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm".

Characters

In order of appearance:
In London:
In Howling village Sussex:
Animals at Cold Comfort Farm:
The interrelations of the characters are complex. The family tree below is an attempt to illustrate them as they stand at the end of the novel.

Futurism

Although the book was published in 1932, the setting is an unspecified near future, shortly after the "Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of 1946". It refers to future social and demographic changes, such as the changing neighbourhoods of London: Mayfair has become a slum and Lambeth is fashionable.
The book contains technological developments that Gibbons thought might have been invented by then, such as TV phones and air-taxis, so the novel has been compared to science fiction.

Other novels

1940 saw the publication of Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm. It is a prequel of sorts, set before Flora's arrival at the farm, and is a parody of a typical family Christmas.
A sequel, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, was published in 1949 to mixed reviews.

Adaptations

Cold Comfort Farm has been adapted several times, including twice by BBC television.
In 1968 a three-part serial was made, starring Sarah Badel as Flora Poste, Brian Blessed as Reuben, Peter Egan as Seth, and Alastair Sim as Amos. Joan Bakewell was the narrator. This BBC adaptation was released on VHS but as of April 2014 is no longer available commercially.
In 1981, the BBC produced a four-part radio adaptation by Elizabeth Proud, who also narrated. Patricia Gallimore played Flora, and Miriam Margolyes played Mrs. Beetle. In January 1983, a 2-part sequel, There Have Always Been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm, set several years later and based on Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, when Flora is married with several children, was broadcast.
In 1995, a television film was produced that was generally well-received by critics. Janet Maslin in The New York Times wrote that this screen version "gets it exactly right". The film starred Kate Beckinsale as Flora, Joanna Lumley as her friend and mentor Mary Smiling, Rufus Sewell as Seth, Ian McKellen as Amos Starkadder, Eileen Atkins as Judith, Stephen Fry as Mybug, Miriam Margolyes as Mrs. Beetle, and Angela Thorne as Mrs Hawk-Monitor. The 1995 version was produced by BBC Films and Thames International, and was directed by John Schlesinger, from a script by novelist Malcolm Bradbury. It was filmed on location at Brightling, East Sussex. In 1996 and 1997, this version also had a brief theatrical run in North America, Australia and some European countries. Schlesinger reportedly used his own money to enlarge the 16mm BBC version of the film to 35mm, which was turned down by several US distributors before being distributed by Gramercy Pictures. As of April 2014, the film is still available on DVD in both the US and UK.

Other uses of title

The book inspired Mellon family heiress Cordelia Scaife May to name her home "Cold Comfort", and to name her philanthropic foundation Colcom Foundation.

Critical reception

BBC News included Cold Comfort Farm on its list of the 100 most influential novels.