Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons’ popular classic Cold Comfort Farm is clever, fun and frothy, but somewhat superficial. The novel owes less to her major influence, Jane Austen, and more to the likes of P. G. Wodehouse. It’s a fun read, but has its limits.

Stella Gibbons’ debut 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm, opens with a quote from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), but the Austen novel it more closely resembles is Emma (1815).

Flora Poste, obsessed with making things nice and tidy, works very much like a modern day Emma Woodhouse, setting her unruly and disorderly country relatives, the Starkadders, on the right path. She creates marriages, forces herself upon others as a career counsellor, and sets rules for hygiene and neatness. Unlike the bossy Emma Woodhouse though, Flora Poste has no great epiphany, allowing her to see the errors of her ways. She is simply always, charmingly right, and in such a fashion that makes Cold Comfort Farm more exclusively a comedy than anything else. This makes the novel fun and clever, but somewhat superficial. There are laughs, but there’s also an air of unreality about everything. In this, Gibbons’ debut novel owes more to P. G. Wodehouse and Ronald Firbank than it does to Jane Austen.

Stella Gibbons would go on to be a prolific writer. The only other Gibbons novel I have read is Westwood (1946), a bittersweet tale of love and longing. Westwood’s depth, maturity and understanding towers above Cold Comfort Farm’s light, fluffy comedy. To be honest, I found Cold Comfort Farm a bit of a let down after the many pleasures of Westwood.

Cold Comfort Farm provides a kind of limited fun, which baffles this reviewer as to its almost cult status.

Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons. Published by Penguin Book. ISBN: 0-14-33959-8