Cold Comfort Farm

by Stella Gibbons

Overview

In Gibbons's classic tale, a resourceful young heroine finds herself in the gloomy, overwrought world of a Hardy or Bronte novel and proceeds to organize everyone out of their romantic tragedies into the pleasures of normal life. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19, chooses to live with relatives at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex, where cows are named Feckless, Aimless, Pointless, and Graceless, and the proprietors, the dour Starkadder family, are tyrannized by Flora's mysterious aunt, who controls the household from a locked room. Flora's confident and clever management of an alarming cast of eccentrics is only half the pleasure of this novel. The other half is Gibbons's wicked sendup of romantic cliches, from the mad woman in the attic to the druidical peasants with their West Country accents and mystical herbs. Anne Massey's skillful rendering of a variety of accents will make this story more accessible to American audiences. Recommended for both literary and popular collections.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781607960218
Publisher:	Beta Nu Publishing
Publication date:	10/02/2008
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	426,672
Product dimensions:	6.09(w) x 9.03(h) x 0.36(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stella Dorothea Gibbons (1902-1989) was born in London. A novelist, poet and short-story writer, her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, won the Femina Vie Heuruse Prize for 1933. Amongst her other novels are Miss Linsey and Pa, Nightingale Wood, Westwood, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, and Beside the Pearly Water (1954).

Lynne Truss is a writer and journalist. She is the author of the number one bestseller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which has sold more than two million copies, won the national British Book Award, and was on the New York Times bestseller list or forty-five weeks. She lives in Brighton, England.

Editorial Reviews

Quite simply one of the funniest satirical novels of the last century.
— NPR's Morning Edition

Nancy Pearl

Delicious . . . Cold Comfort Farm has the sunniness of a P. G. Wodehouse and the comic aplomb of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.

The Independent