Stella Gibbons, who was born in the same year as Georgette Heyer and Stevie Smith, 1902, wrote more than 20 novels, and thought of herself as a poet. But she continues to be remembered, and in some quarters revered, for just one title, a jeu d’esprit that’s a brilliant parody of an inter-war genre of provincial, rural melodrama typified (at the high end) by DH Lawrence and, much lower down, by Mary Webb, author of titles such as Precious Bane and The Golden Arrow. Part of its immediate success was probably also due to the merciless contempt in which the young Gibbons (she was barely 30) held many generations of romantic/pastoral fiction. Or, indeed, the brisk way (with one, two or three asterisks) in which she humorously drew attention to the best bits in her narrative.
Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm while working for on the books pages of the Lady. Inspired, or perhaps provoked, by the fashion for novels set in remote rustic villages about sensitive young men with names like “Micah”, she set about demolishing a piece of treasured literary real estate whose origins can be traced to the late-Victorian novels of Thomas Hardy (No 29 in this series).
From its opening line – “The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged” – to Aunt Ada’s celebrated recollection of “something nasty in the woodshed”, Cold Comfort Farm has the air of a novel written, as it were, in one joyous exhalation, according to Gibbons, somewhere between Lyons Corner House and Boulogne-sur-Mer during the year spanning 1931/32.
The plot is simple. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19 when her parents are both carried off by the 1919 Spanish flu epidemic, is penniless. Her only option is to throw herself on the charity of her remote Sussex relatives, the Starkadders – Judith, her preacher husband Amos, their sons Seth and Reuben, several other cousins (Harkaway, Urk, Ezra, and Caraway) including the dominant matriarchal figure of aunt Ada Doom – all living, or partly living, in Cold Comfort Farm, Howling, Sussex. The Starkadders’ farm is an ominous place with a priapic bull, Big Business, and a hopeless herd of Jersey cows – Graceless, Pointless, Aimless, and Feckless – attended by several taciturn, brooding rustic inhabitants. Among some memorable comic set-pieces, cousin Amos preaching hellfire and damnation to the congregation of the Church of the Quivering Brethren is a high point.
As the rustic mayhem unfolds, Miss Poste, who is definitely a modern, metropolitan bossyboots, decides that it’s her mission to bring a metropolitan “higher common sense” to this benighted spot, and sets about trying to redeem the lives of her relatives. Aunt Ada will go flying to Paris. The memories of the woodshed will become domesticated, Miss Poste herself will eventually marry her country cousin, Charles Fairford, and everyone live happily ever after. Sort of. (It’s a comedy, remember?)
A note on the text
Stella Gibbons humorously disparaged her first novel as the work of a journalist trespassing on a higher calling from “the meaningless and vulgar bustle of newspaper offices”. Cold Comfort Farm was first published by Longmans in 1932, and was, according to the critic Lynne Truss, labelled “middlebrow”, to Gibbons’s disadvantage among the critics. But the book sold very well: 28,000 copies in hardback and 315,000 in paperback in its first 15 years. It won the 1933 prix étranger of the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse, and joined an informal canon of accidental English comic masterpieces. Unlike, for instance, Three Men in a Boat (No 25 in this series), another one-off classic, it found fans mainly in the British Isles. Its afterlife has influenced many writers and it is not fanciful, I think, to see in the film Withnail & I the novel’s lingering influence on later generations. Gibbons herself, in a Punch essay, “Genesis of a Novel”, compared her book to “some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but who is often an embarrassment and a bore”. Looking back, she was, she said, “filled by an incredulous wonder that I could once have been so light-hearted”.
Gibbons twice returned to the scene of her triumph, with Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), and again in 1949 with Conference at Cold Comfort Farm. Both flopped, and remain largely unread. Her Collected Poems appeared in 1950. She died in 1989 and there’s also a biography, Out of the Woodshed: The Life of Stella Gibbons by Reggie Oliver (1998). I’ve listed three prominent titles from among her many other books, all still in print.
Three more from Stella Gibbons
Nightingale Wood (1938); Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940); Westwood (1946).
Cold Comfort Farm is available in Penguin Classics (£7.99). Click here to buy it for £6.39