Adam Lambsbreath is the ancient retainer, 90 years old, who adores Elfine, as well as his cows, Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless (some of whom casually shed various limbs as the story progresses). Elfine, a cousin, is away with the fairies, but she is also somewhat grounded by being in love with the local squire, Richard Hawk-Monitor. Ada’s grandson, Seth Starkadder, is a parody of the Lawrentian male principle, his phallocentrism mitigated by his passion for movies. Aunt Ada Doom, the matriarch of the farm, once saw ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ (the origin of this phrase) and has never got over it. She comes to a place that is none of these things. My lips are sealed … Child, child, if you come to this doomed house, what is to save you? Perhaps you may be able to help us when our hour comes.’įlora is sensible, modern, rational, unshockable and very organised. If you come to us I will do my best to atone, but you must never ask me what for. ‘So you are after your rights at last … Child, my man once did your father a great wrong. But the reply from her cousin Judith Starkadder is too intriguing to pass up: She finally decides to stay with the Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm in the village of Howling in deepest Sussex, as the invitations from other relations sound either boring or uncomfortable in prospect. ‘When I have found a relative who is willing to have me, I shall take him or her in hand, and alter his or her character and mode of living to suit my own taste. She has a long-term plan, and it doesn’t include taking a job: She writes around to various relatives, since, as she tells her friend Mary, living off them seems the best option. Nineteen-year-old Flora Poste needs to find somewhere to live after the death of her parents, as she ‘is possessed of every art and grace save that of earning her own living’. ‘I think, quite without meaning to, I presented a kind of weapon to people, against melodrama and the over-emphasising of disorder and disharmony.’Īnd the epigraph that begins the book is from Jane Austen: ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.’ In a 1981 article in the Listener, Libby Purves quotes Gibbons as saying: It was also aimed at the excesses of DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy in their morbid romanticising and exaggeration of rural life, and there is a definite tilt at the Gothic in the form of the Brontës as well. The novel was written in reaction to the rural romances popular in the 1930s, particularly those of Mary Webb, whose work Gibbons, a journalist, had had to summarise for a magazine. Gibbons says at the beginning of the novel that it is set in the ‘near future’ though this only seems to manifest itself in television-phones and the preponderance of private aeroplanes. Gibbons’s parody is a masterpiece of comedy in its own right.Ĭold Comfort Farm was first published in 1932.
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