James Nicoll Reviews

Stella Gibbons’ 1932 Cold Comfort Farm is a comic science fiction (if only just) novel. It is the first of Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm works.

Orphaned shortly after the Anglo-Nicaraguan War of 1946, young Flora Poste discovers that her negligent parents have left her a meager inheritance of just one hundred pounds per year¹. Having little taste for work, Flora has but one option: find a suitable relative off whom to sponge.

Alas, Flora’s selection of relatives is dismal. In the end, she settles for the Starkadders, who live on Cold Comfort Farm, in darkest Sussex, not far from Howling. Not the most promising of destinations. Flora can only hope there isn’t a Seth or a Reuben Starkadder.

Not only is there both a Seth and Reuben, but the Starkadders are astonishingly rich in all the problems any reader of Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith loam-and-lovechild novels would expect. It’s almost as though the lugubriously troubled Starkadders had a list of problems they were checking off when achieved.

While uninterested in employment, Flora does not mind embracing Projects. Putting Cold Comfort Farm to rights is a perfect pastime. Each member of the family has an obsession or an impediment that defines and immiserates their lives. No Starkadder can see any escape from their current situation. Flora, being a perfectly sensible young woman from entirely modern London, believes she can, even while fending off the unwanted attentions of the loathsome Mr. Mybug.

Is Flora as capable as she believes she is? Has Flora met her match in Aunt Ada Doom? Will Flora become another inmate trapped forever in the damp rustic Hell that is Cold Comfort Farm?

~oOo~

So, about the science fiction angle: this is set post-1946 in a world that does not appear to have had a World War II, but which did have an Anglo-Nicaraguan War. That appears to have been traumatic for the supporting characters who participated. This post-1946 setting also features television phones and unevenly distributed airplane service (apparently something a woman with of Flora’s meager resources would offhandedly consider). I have no idea why Gibbons set her novel in the future. Perhaps it was to underline the rusticity of Sussex.

Two important plot details: the Skarkadders invite Flora to make up for some egregious sin committed against Flora’s father. We never learn what that was, except it involved a goat that may or may not have survived. As well, Aunt Ada Doom saw something nasty in the woodshed. What it was (or if she really did) is a mystery to which we will never learn the solution.

I have always read every character in Martin’s A Game of Thrones in the voices of the characters in the Cold Comfort Farm movie (see the adjacent review). There just isn’t a lot of air between ​“There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort,” and ​“There must always be a Stark in Winterfell.” I greatly recommend this approach².

A detail I had completely forgotten: Mybug’s literary project, which is to write a great work proving that Branwell Bronte was a victim of his grasping, untalented sisters, and that not only did Branwell write all the novels credited to his sisters, all of his vices are cruel libels of a man whose only sin was loving his sisters too much³. Mybug’s thesis could come straight out of How to Suppress Women’s Writing.

Speaking of Mybug, there is some controversy whether he is intended solely to poke fun at pretentious intellectuals or if he is also an antisemitic caricature. On the one hand, vicious antisemitism was for British authors of the 1930s what poisonous transphobia is to the British authors of the 2020s. On the other, why on Earth would anyone attribute antisemitism to an author who very early in Cold Comfort Farm dropped a reference to a ​“Jew shop”? We shall never know.

Most of the characters are broad caricatures, as one might expect. This is a comedy poking fun at a particular genre. I wouldn’t say that the novel is especially snarky or mean-spirited, at least not towards the characters. Each of them has the spark of a better life within them, if only they can somehow escape the conventions of the genre in which they are trapped. As to whether Gibbons disliked loam-and-lovechild books, I could not say, but this book does not feel like a cousin to Bimbos of the Death Sun.

Readers might be surprised by the manner in which Flora’s plans proceed flawlessly, as though in greased rails. Well, this is a short novel, Flora has a legion of relatives (each of whom require individual correction), and there isn’t sufficient page count to deal with impediments. It could also be that the author is making the point that the seemingly intractable and inescapable Starkadder problems⁴ are not so very difficult if one sensible young woman can quickly mend them all.

Cold Comfort Farm is a skillfully executed comedy, expertly supported by the author’s memorable and extremely quotable prose. Cold Comfort Farm is also unusual in that it has had at least one adaptation worth watching… see the adjacent review.

Cold Comfort Farm is available here (Penguin Modern Classics), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK, here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Was Gibbons (writing in 1932) considering inflation when imagining Flora’s financial situation in 1946? If not, £100 per annum would require about £6,000 in 1932 pounds. If she foresaw inflation correctly, then £100 in 1946 pounds would be actually be a much smaller sum and would have required only about £3,500 in 1932 pounds.

2: How wrong would it be to create motivational posters attributing Cold Comfort Farm quotations to Game of Thrones characters?

3: Loving his sisters, but not in that way. Mybug may be D. H. Lawrence but he isn’t Robert Heinlein.

4: Many of which boil down to Aunt Ada Doom being determined to keep Cold Comfort frozen in amber, even at the cost of tremendous frustration and misery for the Starkadders. In Doom’s defense, she saw something nasty in the woodshed.