Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.
Penguin Books, 2006. 233 pages.
Stella Dorothea Gibbon’s first novel, a rollicking parody of rural fiction, must have been all the rage at the time of its publication in 1932. It's just so much cheeky sneaky fun!
Educated and penniless, orphaned heroine Flora Poste chooses an unconventional path to financial and domestic stability: she seeks out maternal relatives at the farm in question, an isolated rustic domicile conveniently located down the road from the fictional Sussex village of Howling. The Starkadder clan welcomes Flora to their squalid homestead—to atone, it seems, for a never-explained but apparently significant wrong done to her father at some moment in the family’s murky past.
Pragmatic and spunky Flora settles into life with the Starkadders and proceeds to reorganize and reinvent the lives of her unabashedly weird relatives. By her own wit and cleverness—and armed with a handbook appropriately titled The Higher Common Sense—Flora pulls the extended family into the twentieth century. Along the way, she educates everyone within hailing distance on the finer points of contraception, social etiquette, and wardrobe selection; she engages in matchmaking and psychoanalysis; she encourages agricultural efficiency, itinerant preaching, and greater appreciation of church architecture; she recognizes burning desire and rewards unrequited love.
Educated and penniless, orphaned heroine Flora Poste chooses an unconventional path to financial and domestic stability: she seeks out maternal relatives at the farm in question, an isolated rustic domicile conveniently located down the road from the fictional Sussex village of Howling. The Starkadder clan welcomes Flora to their squalid homestead—to atone, it seems, for a never-explained but apparently significant wrong done to her father at some moment in the family’s murky past.
Pragmatic and spunky Flora settles into life with the Starkadders and proceeds to reorganize and reinvent the lives of her unabashedly weird relatives. By her own wit and cleverness—and armed with a handbook appropriately titled The Higher Common Sense—Flora pulls the extended family into the twentieth century. Along the way, she educates everyone within hailing distance on the finer points of contraception, social etiquette, and wardrobe selection; she engages in matchmaking and psychoanalysis; she encourages agricultural efficiency, itinerant preaching, and greater appreciation of church architecture; she recognizes burning desire and rewards unrequited love.
She also confronts the unseen yet omnipresent specter of Aunt Ada Doom, an ill-tempered character reputedly driven to reclusive insanity by an unspeakable-yet-often-alluded-to childhood trauma. No self-respecting work of pessimistic fiction is complete, after all, without a recollection of something nasty in the woodshed, without that tortured soul lurking behind an upper floor locked door, haunting the entire household with oppressive karmic crankiness. And let’s not forget Graceless, Aimless, Feckless, and Pointless, the farm’s appendage-deficit disorderly cows. Cold Comfort Farm is short and sweet and smart—a comically grim pastoral—and quite a send-up of doom-and-gloomy British rural fiction.
Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons.
Penguin Books, 2010. 387 pages.
Our Anglophilic friends will also enjoy Stella Gibbon’s Nightingale Wood. This charming modern fairy tale, circa 1938, features long-suffering plucky heroine Viola Withers, forced to live with insufferable in-laws following her husband’s untimely demise. Lovely and lonely Viola finds an Essex country house exile to be rather tedious and dreadful: stingy tyrant Mr. Withers and snooty matriarch Mrs. Withers take polite turns driving the penniless widowed bride to the brink of youthful boredom and utter despair. This unconscionable treatment prompts just the right amount of weeping into freshly laundered pillows, dabbing bravely at red-rimmed eyes, and stumbling blindly through seemingly enchanted adjacent woodland property—straight into the welcoming arms of Local Prince Charming Victor Spring. But wait! Victor’s intentions are… not quite honorable. Gentle Readers, we have ourselves a part-time Prince Charming, part-time Cad.
We also have: a charity ball, a transformational dress accompanied by a number of questionable wardrobe decisions, a disastrous wind-swept garden party, quite a few broken hearts, a surprising conflagration, several mended hearts and, not surprisingly, a rather happy ending. Nightingale Wood is whimsical and satirical—and surprisingly touching. Even beyond the tortured romance of Viola and Victor, companion stories of go-getter-go-get-her chauffeur Saxon and fading-but-not-faded Tina-- and of stout, practical Madge and beloved pooch Polo—offer an awful lot to like. We don’t imagine that the Brontë sisters would enjoy this rediscovered gem one bit, but we highly recommend giving it a whirl across the floor.
We also have: a charity ball, a transformational dress accompanied by a number of questionable wardrobe decisions, a disastrous wind-swept garden party, quite a few broken hearts, a surprising conflagration, several mended hearts and, not surprisingly, a rather happy ending. Nightingale Wood is whimsical and satirical—and surprisingly touching. Even beyond the tortured romance of Viola and Victor, companion stories of go-getter-go-get-her chauffeur Saxon and fading-but-not-faded Tina-- and of stout, practical Madge and beloved pooch Polo—offer an awful lot to like. We don’t imagine that the Brontë sisters would enjoy this rediscovered gem one bit, but we highly recommend giving it a whirl across the floor.
