Cold Comfort Farm

Summary

Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel parodying the overwrought rural fiction of the early twentieth century, the 'loam and lovechild' school associated with writers such as Mary Webb and D. H. Lawrence. It is set in a slightly futuristic England of video-phones and air taxis. Flora Poste, nineteen, well educated and practical, is orphaned with a small income and decides to live with relatives rather than work. She chooses the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, near the village of Howling in Sussex, who have written that they owe her a mysterious debt for a wrong done to her father. The farm is a parody of rural doom: sukebind blooms in the hedgerows and stirs dark passions, the cows are named Graceless, Pointless, Feckless and Aimless, and the household is ruled from her upstairs room by the reclusive matriarch Aunt Ada Doom, who keeps her family at home with the repeated claim that as a small child she saw something nasty in the woodshed. Among the cast are Judith, Ada's daughter, brooding with an unhealthy passion for her son Seth, a smouldering lothario obsessed with the 'talkies'; her husband Amos, a hellfire preacher to the Church of the Quivering Brethren; Reuben, who longs to own the farm; the old farmhand Adam Lambsbreath, who cleans dishes with a thorn twig; and young Elfine, a wild, poetry-writing girl in love with the local squire's son. Flora, guided by her own sense of order and a handbook called The Higher Common Sense, sets out to tidy them all up. She has Elfine taught to dress and behave so that she can win and marry Richard Hawk-Monitor; persuades Amos to take his preaching on the road in a Ford van, leaving the farm to Reuben; introduces Seth to a Hollywood producer who makes him a film star; and arranges for Judith to be treated by a psychoanalyst. Along the way she fends off the pretentious intellectual Mr Mybug, who is writing a book claiming Branwell Brontë wrote his sisters' novels. Her final triumph is Aunt Ada herself: in a long talk Flora persuades her to take up modern life, and Ada leaves for Paris in flying kit. At Elfine's wedding the farm is transformed, and Flora, her work done, is collected by her cousin Charles in his aeroplane, realising that she loves him.

Plot or Argument

• Flora's arrival

  Flora chooses the Starkadders and arrives at the gloomy farm, meeting its dramatic, gloomy inhabitants.

• Taking stock

  Flora learns the household's grievances and secrets: Ada's woodshed, Judith's obsession, Amos's preaching and Elfine's romance.

• Tidying up

  Flora methodically resolves each character's problem: Elfine's makeover, Amos's mission, Seth's film career, Judith's analysis.

• Aunt Ada and the wedding

  Flora's conversation with Aunt Ada leads to the matriarch's liberation; Elfine marries Richard; Flora leaves with Charles.

Characters

• Flora Poste, protagonist

  Sensible, sophisticated young woman who imposes order on her chaotic relatives.

• Aunt Ada Doom, matriarch

  Reclusive tyrant who controls her family through the memory of something nasty in the woodshed.

• Judith Starkadder, Ada's daughter

  Melodramatic mother consumed by passion for her son Seth.

• Amos Starkadder, Judith's husband

  Fire-and-brimstone preacher of the Quivering Brethren.

• Seth Starkadder, Judith's son

  Sensual young man whose true passion turns out to be the cinema.

• Elfine Starkadder, Judith's daughter

  Dreamy girl whom Flora prepares to marry the squire's son.

• Adam Lambsbreath, farmhand

  Ancient labourer devoted to Elfine and the cows.

• Mr Mybug, intellectual

  Pretentious writer who pursues Flora and theorises about the Brontës.

• Charles Fairford, Flora's cousin

  Clergyman-to-be who flies to collect Flora at the end.

Lessons

• Common sense against melodrama

  Flora defeats gloom and passion with practical arrangements. The novel champions clear-eyed sense against the romantic belief that suffering is profound.

  • Is Flora a heroine or a busybody?
  • Does the novel take anyone's pain seriously?

• Parody as criticism

  By exaggerating the clichés of rural novels, Gibbons exposes their absurdities. The starred 'purple passages' turn literary criticism into comedy.

  • Which kind of writing is being parodied, and is it fair?
  • What does the parody reveal about how we read 'serious' fiction?

• Control through invalidism

  Aunt Ada's power rests on a vague childhood trauma and a refusal to leave her room. The novel satirises how a household can be organised around one person's illness or grievance.

  • What was the 'something nasty' and does it matter?
  • How does Flora free Ada?
  • What does the novel suggest about Freudian explanations?

Context

The novel parodies the popular rural novels of the 1910s–1920s, especially Mary Webb's Precious Bane (1924), and the earthy mysticism of D. H. Lawrence, as well as the vogue for psychoanalysis among intellectuals. Its futuristic setting gently mocks contemporary fascination with technology.

Composition

Gibbons drew on reviewing such novels as a journalist. The book was published by Longmans in 1932, with a preface addressed to a fictional 'Anthony Pookworthy' explaining the system of starring the finest passages.

Reception

The novel won the Femina–Vie Heureuse Prize in 1933, reportedly to Virginia Woolf's irritation. It has remained popular, with stage and screen adaptations including a 1995 film directed by John Schlesinger.

Comparisons

• northanger-abbey

  Both are parodies of popular genres (rural doom, Gothic horror) in which a young heroine's common sense is tested against romantic expectations.

• wuthering-heights

  Mr Mybug's theory about Branwell Brontë and the farm's brooding passions point directly at the Brontë tradition Gibbons mocks.

• excellent-women

  Pym's Mildred and Gibbons's Flora are both sensible women managing other people's lives in comic English settings.

• persuasion

  Austen's Anne Elliot and Flora both see their families' follies clearly, though Austen's comedy is gentler and more melancholy.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The foreword addressed to the novelist Anthony Pookworthy, where Gibbons explains that she has marked her finest passages with one, two, or three stars so that reviewers can tell literature from mere prose. Notice what kind of writing earns the stars when you come to it.
• Flora's reasons for choosing the Starkadders out of all her relatives, and the mysterious wrong done to her father that Judith keeps alluding to without explaining.
• Aunt Ada Doom's upstairs room and the rhythm of her refusals. Every time someone tries to leave the farm, she has an attack and returns to what she saw in the woodshed as a child.
• Flora's method with each Starkadder: Elfine's dress and manners for the Hawk-Monitor ball, Amos's Ford van, Seth's meeting with the Hollywood producer, and the long private talk with Aunt Ada.
• The futuristic details, such as air taxis and video-telephones, set casually beside the ancient farm. Gibbons sets her parody slightly ahead of her own time.

Key terms and names

Starkadders

The family that has always lived at Cold Comfort Farm and believes it can never leave. Their names, Judith, Amos, Reuben, Seth, Urk, Elfine, and the rest, and their brooding grievances parody the families of rural tragedy.

Sukebind

An invented hedgerow plant whose flowering each spring is supposed to stir dark and fateful passions. It mocks the way rural novels treated nature as a force driving their characters to doom.

The Higher Common Sense

The book of practical maxims that Flora consults, attributed to the invented Abbé Fausse-Maigre. It stands for her whole approach to life: calm, sensible, and deeply unromantic.

Church of the Quivering Brethren

The chapel in Beershorn where Amos preaches to a congregation that delights in hearing they will burn. Flora attends a meeting and later persuades Amos that his gifts call for a wider mission.

The woodshed

The place where Aunt Ada saw something nasty as a child, which she has used ever since to keep her family bound to the farm. The novel never says what she saw, and that is the point.

Mr Mybug

A writer from London who follows Flora about the countryside, sees symbols of passion in every tree, and is writing a book arguing that Branwell Brontë wrote his sisters' novels.

Loam and lovechild novel

The popular rural fiction of the 1910s and 1920s, full of earthy passions, ancestral curses, and heavy dialect, that Gibbons parodies. Her targets include writers like Mary Webb, whose Precious Bane had been a bestseller.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why does Flora go to live at Cold Comfort Farm rather than earn her living, and what does she find when she arrives?
2. Comprehension How does Aunt Ada Doom keep the family from ever leaving the farm, and what does Flora finally persuade her to do?
3. Comprehension What does Flora arrange for Elfine, for Amos, and for Seth, and how does each arrangement suit the person?
4. Interpretation Flora solves every problem at the farm by treating the Starkadders as ordinary people with ordinary wants rather than as figures of tragic destiny. What is Gibbons suggesting about the kind of novels the Starkadders seem to have stepped out of?
5. Interpretation Flora is generous, effective, and also rather managing. Is she the heroine of the novel, a gentle target of its satire, or both?
6. Interpretation Amos preaches that his congregation will burn, and they love it. What does the comedy of the Quivering Brethren mock: religion itself, or a particular taste for gloom that can attach itself to religion?
7. Big Question Aunt Ada rules her family by an old injury that no one is allowed to question. Can a household or a community be held captive by its grievances, and what does it take to set it free?

Faith Connections

• Philippians 3:13-14 (Scripture)

  Paul speaks of forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. Aunt Ada has organized her whole life and household around one thing that lies behind her, the woodshed, and her release at the end comes when she turns to something new.

• 1 John 4:18 (Scripture)

  There is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear. Amos's preaching runs entirely on fear of burning, and the novel's comedy depends on noticing how little that fear changes anyone, which the epistle would explain by its absence of love.

• Proverbs 8:12-14 (Scripture)

  Wisdom says that she dwells with prudence and has counsel and sound judgment. Flora is a comic image of prudence entering a house ruled by passion and setting it in order, though her wisdom is worldly and practical rather than the fear of the Lord with which Proverbs begins.

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI (Great Conversation)

  Aristotle describes practical wisdom as the virtue of deliberating well about what is good for a human life in particular circumstances, a virtue later taken up by Aquinas as the charioteer of the virtues. Flora practices it with each Starkadder in turn, and the novel is in part a comedy of prudence.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The rural tragic novel presents country people as driven by fate, soil, and dark passion; but when a sensible person treats them as ordinary people with ordinary wants, their supposed doom turns out to be habit, self-indulgence, and a matriarch's grievance; therefore the gloom of such novels is a literary pose rather than a truth about country life, and common sense, kindly applied, can dissolve it.

Rhetorical device: parody. The starred passages promised in the foreword, overwrought descriptions of the land and of the Starkadders' passions, imitate the inflated nature-writing of rural fiction so closely that the reader laughs at the style itself. The stars are a joke on readers and critics who mistake heavy writing for profound writing.

Debate: Resolved: Flora Poste does more good than harm by rearranging the lives of the Starkadders.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Every Starkadder believes he or she is bound to the farm by fate, yet each one leaves or changes once Flora finds the right inducement. Argue what the novel suggests about the difference between real tragedy and self-dramatizing gloom, using at least three members of the family.

Comparison with Wuthering Heights: Gibbons gives Mr Mybug a theory that Branwell wrote his sisters' novels, and much of Cold Comfort Farm mocks the passionate, doom-laden rural world that Wuthering Heights helped make famous. Compare Aunt Ada's hold over the Starkadders with Heathcliff's hold over the Earnshaws and Lintons, and argue why the same situation can be tragic in one novel and comic in the other.

Medical Lens

A comic resource on the cultural reception of psychoanalysis in interwar England. Aunt Ada's lifelong confinement to her room on the basis of an unspecified childhood shock satirises both the manipulative invalid and the popular Freudian idea of a single repressed trauma explaining everything; it can be read alongside discussions of agoraphobia and secondary gain, but the book plays it for laughs. Flora's referral of Judith to a psychoanalyst, and Mr Mybug's Freudian readings of the landscape, mock contemporary enthusiasm for the talking cure and the sexualising of everything. Seth and the sukebind parody pseudo-biological theories of rural passion.

• Early chapters and passim

  Aunt Ada keeps to her room and controls her family through the memory of the woodshed.

  HypochondriaTrauma Shell Shock
• Later chapters

  Flora arranges for Judith to see a psychoanalyst to cure her fixation on her son.

  Physicians DoctorsPsychology UnconsciousObsession Monomania
• Mr Mybug's walks with Flora

  Mybug reads sexual symbolism into nature, parodying Freudian criticism.

  Sexuality MedicalizedPsychology Unconscious
• Penultimate chapters

  Flora's long conversation with Ada, which ends her self-imposed confinement.

  Hypochondria

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write Judith Starkadder's first session with her psychoanalyst.

• Essay

  Compare Cold Comfort Farm's parody of rural fiction with Northanger Abbey's parody of the Gothic. What does each say about how novels shape readers?

Further Reading

• Precious Bane, Mary Webb

  One of the rural novels Gibbons parodies.

• Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

• Cold Comfort Farm (film), John Schlesinger (director)