Question 1

What is Cold Comfort Farm parodying?

Accepted Answer

Cold Comfort Farm is a parody of the English rural novel tradition — specifically the dark, brooding, Lawrence-influenced novels of rural life that were fashionable in the 1920s and early 1930s, in which passionate, inarticulate country people were imprisoned in their landscape and their heritage, driven by atavistic forces they could not understand or resist. Gibbons's specific targets include the novels of Mary Webb (particularly Precious Bane), Sheila Kaye-Smith, and D.H. Lawrence's more earthy work; the Starkadders are a composite parody of the archetypal figures in these novels — the brooding masculine figure (Seth, who is irresistible to women), the ancient matriarch who controls everyone through the memory of some undefined primal wrong (Aunt Ada Doom, who 'saw something nasty in the woodshed'), the repressed religious figure (Amos), and so on. The parody works because Gibbons knows the tradition intimately — she was a reader of its novels and a reviewer for literary journals — and because her vehicle, Flora Poste, is the perfect instrument for the demolition: a woman of common sense and good cheer who simply refuses to be impressed by Gothic atmosphere.

Question 2

Who is Flora Poste, and what is her method?

Accepted Answer

Flora Poste is one of the most satisfying heroines in English comic fiction: twenty years old, recently orphaned, possessed of a small income and a large confidence in her own good sense, and firmly committed to the principle that uncomfortable situations can be improved by the application of practical intelligence and good organization. She descends on Cold Comfort Farm not to be overwhelmed by its atmosphere but to sort it out, and she does so with a cheerful efficiency that the Gothic novel's conventions cannot survive. Her method is essentially therapeutic and practical: she identifies what each Starkadder most wants, establishes whether it is a reasonable thing to want, and then arranges for them to have it. Seth wants to be in films — Flora gets him into films. Elfine wants to go to parties and marry a nice man — Flora introduces her to the right people. Amos wants to preach across America — Flora obtains him a van and sends him off. The result is that the farm, deprived of its cast of Gothic archetypes, becomes simply an agricultural enterprise, and the Starkadders, deprived of their roles in the tragedy, become ordinary people with ordinary desires.

Question 3

Why does Cold Comfort Farm still read as funny?

Accepted Answer

Cold Comfort Farm has remained in print and in favor for nearly a century because its comedy is grounded in a conflict — between romantic Gothic extravagance and common-sense pragmatism — that does not date. Gibbons's specific targets (Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith) are obscure today, but the type of novel she is parodying — the novel that takes rural life with immense seriousness, that treats the landscape as a spiritual force and the people in it as driven by dark compulsions they cannot articulate — remains entirely familiar. The parody also works because Gibbons is genuinely funny at the sentence level: her prose is witty in itself, not just in its relationship to the tradition it is parodying, and Flora's inner voice has an acidic intelligence that does not depend on knowledge of the source material. The novel's solution to the Gothic — that common sense and good organization are sufficient to resolve almost any dark inheritance — remains both comic and, in a certain light, genuinely persuasive.

Cold Comfort Farm Reading Order

Complete Cold Comfort Farm Book List