The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic, and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.
Description:
What do you do when you are a 19-year-old woman, single, orphaned, well-educated, poor except for a small annual allowance, and "cannot play bridge"? What do you do when your only ambition is to "write a novel as good as Persuasion" at age fifty-three," and your plan for the next thirty years is to just spend time "collecting material for it"?
Well, since you must live, you matter-of-factly write every relative you can rummage up and ask whether they would like have a family member stay with them in return for the small financial compensation you can offer. You naturally enter this new lifestyle with some trepidation, but also have complete confidence in your own ability to make the best of any situation and straighten out any pesky problems you might face from the family members and their environment.
Such is the case for Flora Poste in Stella Gibbons' wickedly funny classic, Cold Comfort Farm. It is a book many readers do not know about or have long forgotten, but is well worth the effort to find it in a library or good bookstore. Once it's in your hands, settle in to experience Fiona Poste's new life with the strangest family and environment you can imagine, the Starkadders on their ominously named Cold Comfort Farm.
The only letter Flora receives in response to her note that offers a positive response comes from a distant cousin, Judith Starkadder, in Howling, Sussex, who wrote:
Not exactly the most encouraging of letters or potential living possibility. It's more like the start of a Gothic horror story rather than a peculiar comedic narrative. But Flora, ever calm and confident, accepts the offer and journeys to Sussex to meet her distant relatives. There she meets:
Armed with the wisdom and guidance of her trusty book, The Higher Common Sense by Abbe Fausse-Maigre, Flora takes on the task of tidying up the household and people to bring this chaotic world into shape. It is a confident Flora who little by little progresses in her goal to create a silk purse out of the various sow's ears she finds at Cold Comfort Farm. Her motto is:
A sly, subtle and quietly hilarious style of writing and conversation shows Gibbon to be the master of the underplayed humor. Ridiculous people formally presented and dealt with in a deadpan Victorian style makes Cold Comfort Farm a particularly delightful read. It's full of scenes and characters so laughable in their earnest cluelessness and peculiarities that any encounter with Flora's realism and upright airs can only lead to fun and games.
It's a book full delicious humor and witty writing, a forgotten gem that I highly recommend for a unique read that won't soon be forgotten.
Well, since you must live, you matter-of-factly write every relative you can rummage up and ask whether they would like have a family member stay with them in return for the small financial compensation you can offer. You naturally enter this new lifestyle with some trepidation, but also have complete confidence in your own ability to make the best of any situation and straighten out any pesky problems you might face from the family members and their environment.
Such is the case for Flora Poste in Stella Gibbons' wickedly funny classic, Cold Comfort Farm. It is a book many readers do not know about or have long forgotten, but is well worth the effort to find it in a library or good bookstore. Once it's in your hands, settle in to experience Fiona Poste's new life with the strangest family and environment you can imagine, the Starkadders on their ominously named Cold Comfort Farm.
The only letter Flora receives in response to her note that offers a positive response comes from a distant cousin, Judith Starkadder, in Howling, Sussex, who wrote:
Child, my man once did your father a great wrong. If you will come to us I will do my best to atone, but you must never ask me what for. My lips are sealed....if you come to this doomed house, what is to save you. Perhaps you may be able to help us when our hour comes.
Not exactly the most encouraging of letters or potential living possibility. It's more like the start of a Gothic horror story rather than a peculiar comedic narrative. But Flora, ever calm and confident, accepts the offer and journeys to Sussex to meet her distant relatives. There she meets:
- Judith Starkadder, a sad, pessimistic woman who "looked a woman without boundaries...[and] fitted for any stage, however enormous";
- Amos Starkadder, Judith's hulking wreck of a husband;
- Aunt Ada Doom, the reclusive matriarch of the Starkadder family who as a girl "saw something nasty in the woodshed" and took to her bed for untold years ever after;
- Seth and Reuben Starkadder, Judith's handsome, indolent sons;
- Adam Lambsbreath, the hired hand, "linked to all dumb brutes by a chain forged in soil and sweat";
- Elfine, Adam's 17-year-old daughter, "as wild and shy as a pharisee of the woods";
- Meriam a young hired girl who for each of the last four years has had a love child, all of whom are raised and trained by Meriam's mother to become "one of them jazz-bands";
- An endless supply of half-brothers and half-cousins who work as hired hands;
- And last but not least, Graceless, Pointless, Feckless, and Aimless, the family cows, along with Viper, the Starkadder's vicious horse
Armed with the wisdom and guidance of her trusty book, The Higher Common Sense by Abbe Fausse-Maigre, Flora takes on the task of tidying up the household and people to bring this chaotic world into shape. It is a confident Flora who little by little progresses in her goal to create a silk purse out of the various sow's ears she finds at Cold Comfort Farm. Her motto is:
Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.
A sly, subtle and quietly hilarious style of writing and conversation shows Gibbon to be the master of the underplayed humor. Ridiculous people formally presented and dealt with in a deadpan Victorian style makes Cold Comfort Farm a particularly delightful read. It's full of scenes and characters so laughable in their earnest cluelessness and peculiarities that any encounter with Flora's realism and upright airs can only lead to fun and games.
It's a book full delicious humor and witty writing, a forgotten gem that I highly recommend for a unique read that won't soon be forgotten.
If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat
Very dry, witty book about the adventures of a group of friends who decide to take a short boat trip down the Thames River in Victorian England. Deliciously funny in their observations and encounters with the passing scenery and their incompetence with all things nautical and each other, not to mention their faithful dog, Montmorency.
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