Cold Comfort Farm

1932, undated (see below) Penguin edition
Stella Gibbons
Cold Comfort Farm
Original price unknown, bought used for $2.95
Worn paperback
B

This is definitely a case of seeing the adaptation first, specifically the 1995 Kate Beckinsdale version.  (There's also a three-parter made for British television in '68.)  The book goes into more detail of course, including about the wrong done to Flora's father.  ("And did the goat die?")  I think the inevitable simplification of adaptation pays off in regards to two characters, Mrs. Smiling and Charles.  Gibbons has a habit of introducing characters and then lightly tossing them aside and substituting others.  It plays better with Charles rather than Claud as Flora's date to the birthday ball, and you need to see Mrs. Smiling's reactions to Flora's mad country relations.

Speaking of relatives, there's a well-done family tree here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cold-comfort-farm-genealogy.png

The book is a parody of a bunch of genres I haven't read.  (The closest is I've read about D. H. Lawrence in Sexual Politics.)  I think it works fine on its own, like in the purple prose that Gibbons helpfully stars à la Baedeker.  My favorite bits are actually when the narrator gently teases the heroine, as in "Flora, who, as we know loathed parties, dined quietly with intelligent men: a way of passing the evening which she adored, because then she could show-off a lot and talk about herself."  The book opens with a misquote from Mansfield Park, and Flora hopes that when she's 53 she'll write a book just as good as Persuasion, but with a modern setting of course.  The book does feel at times like a lesser Jane Austen novel, with a modern setting of course.


About that modern setting.  The post-Foreword Note says, "The action of the story takes place in the near future," and there is a reference to the Anglo-Nicaraguan War of 1946.  And yet, 90-year-old Amos sings a song he learned for the wedding of George IV (1795).  It's part of the same absurdity that allows cows to lose limbs without suffering, and four children under the age of four to all speak, perform chores, and be trained to form a jazz band.


I wish I could give this book a higher grade, but it does feel like it becomes tired before it concludes on p. 233.  Also, I can't say I entirely sympathize with Flora's aims.  On the one hand, it's great to see her bring cleanliness and sanity to the farm denizens.  When she, a very nice middle-class (probably virginal) girl recommends birth control to the mother of the "embryo jazz band," it's both shocking and sensible, in a very pleasing way.  But I have mixed feelings about her advice to Elfine.  Yes, it helps Elfine capture Richard Hawk-Monitor, but is he such a prize?  Elfine's minor rebellion is to plan to write poetry in secret and publish when she's 50.


Also, the line "Like all really strong-minded women, on whom everybody flops, she adored being bossed about.  It was so restful" brings out my feminist grrrr, although it's not as bad as what happens to Dorothy in But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.  Gibbons does mock the idea that Branwell Brontë wrote his sisters' novels and poetry, here presented by pretentious intellectual Mr. Mybug, but still a recurring theory, as a quick Google search shows.

(Of course, the weirdest book I have about the "truth" of the Brontës is The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë, a laughably bad 1999 mystery.)

Gibbons died in 1989, but the biographical page mentions The Woods in Winter (1970) and describes her as living in North London, so this edition obviously came out in the 1970s or '80s.