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.

Top 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.

• Parody as criticism

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

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Later chapters

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

• Mr Mybug's walks with Flora

  Mybug reads sexual symbolism into nature, parodying Freudian criticism.

• Penultimate chapters

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