‘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.’

She is 19 years old, when both her parents die within months of each other, leaving her orphaned and homeless, with an annual inheritance of £100. The book narrates the story of Flora Poste. Stella Gibbons takes this husk and turns it inside out, fills it with impish humour, and fits it back. Written in 1932, it is a tongue-in-cheek rendering of a story set on a farm, the kind made popular by several writers who infused the setting with gloom and misery and human degradation and deprivation.

The book has been adapted twice by the BBC, and later made into a television film. The epigraph at the beginning of ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ is from Jane Austen: ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.’ ‘I think, quite without meaning to, I presented a kind of weapon to people, against melodrama and the over-emphasising of disorder and disharmony.’ In an article in the ‘ Listener’, written in 1981, Libby Purves quotes Stella Gibbons as saying: Thirdly, it is ‘flueful of wit.’ If one were to combine Oscar Wilde, Richmal Crompton, Richard Amour, Robert Buckman and Bill Bryson in more or less equal parts, you might get Stella Gibbons in ‘Cold Comfort Farm.’ Which is probably an exaggeration, but fresh from a second read of the book, this is what I feel. I haven’t ever read a book that I would want to quote so extensively, as ‘ Cold Comfort Farm.’ It is also a book that I felt impelled and compelled to read through, the second time: not just parts of it, but the whole.įirstly, it is amusing.

Stella gibbons