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Summary
Summary
Flora Poste, orphaned at twenty, decides to go and live with her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm. Once there she discovers they exist in a state of chaos and feels it is up to her to bring order. From the author of LIGHT AND EASY.
Author Notes
Stella Gibbons was born on January 5, 1902 in London. She married Allan Bourne Webb in 1933 and had one child. Raised in a poor and unhappy home, she used her vivid imagination as a means of escape, often telling stories to entertain her younger brothers and other children in the neighborhood. She held numerous jobs including drama critic, reporter, and fashion writer and was a frequent contributor to magazines such as Punch and Tattler, writing short stories and poetry.
Gibbons is best known for her novel Cold Comfort Farm. A satirical portrait of rural British life in the 1930's, it won the Femina Vie Heureuse prize in 1933. In the book, Flora, a socialite, is orphaned and forced to live with relatives in the country. Flora tries to bring order and sense to the gloomy Starkadders on Cold Comfort Farm. To the delight of readers, this novel has been adapted several times as successful British films.
Stella Gibbons died on December 19, 1989 in London.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
Flora Poste, cheerfully orphaned at 19, decides her only option, on pounds 100 a year, is to stay with one of four sets of hitherto unknown relatives. The fortunate recipients of her patronage are the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm near the village of Howling in deepest Sussex. Remorseful Judith, crazed preacher Amos, fey Elfine, rippling Seth and taciturn Reuben all live together under the malevolent eye of semi-recluse Aunt Ada Doom, who has never recovered from a childhood sighting of a certain nasty something in the woodshed. To imperturbable Flora they are merely instruments of her passionate desire to organise and reform - which she does with precision and gusto. Stella Gibbons's bracing send-up of the rural operatics of popular novelists such as Mary Webb is as deliciously funny and its imperious heroine as adorable as when the book was first published in 1932, becoming an instant bestseller. As Lynne Truss points out in her introduction, Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm as an antidote to her own tortuous family background. Its pitch- perfect descriptions, coupled with the coolness and brevity of Flora's observations, are matchless. Caption: article-12.1 Flora Poste, cheerfully orphaned at 19, decides her only option, on pounds 100 a year, is to stay with one of four sets of hitherto unknown relatives. The fortunate recipients of her patronage are the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm near the village of Howling in deepest Sussex. - Catherine Taylor.
Library Journal Review
In Gibbons's classic tale, first published in 1932, 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.-- Sharon Cumberland, Graduate Ctr., CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
