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Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics)

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I was very much looking forward to seeing this. The cast looked very promising (especially Alastair Sim) and the BBC has a high reputation when bringing classic literature to the screen.

Reference to Cold Comfort Farm usually triggers the famous quote that there was ‘something nasty in the woodshed’. Aunt Ada Doom claims to have seen it when she was ‘no bigger than a titty wren’. Gibbons would never reveal what the ‘something nasty’ was; but it represents childhood trauma, whether real or imagined, and the way its ‘victims’ use it to excuse their behaviour. Woolf was – not for the first time – quite wrong. Of the winners of the Prix Étranger from this interwar period, only two are remembered in 2011 – the other is her own To the Lighthouse – and only one, Cold Comfort Farm, can claim to have introduced a phrase to our everyday language: when people talk of having seen "something nasty in the woodshed", they're referencing, whether they know it or not, the Starkadder family's presiding recluse, Aunt Ada Doom, who was driven mad by just such a vision as a child. As expressions go, I personally find this one exceedingly useful. The heroine is the lovely, recently orphaned nineteen-year-old Flora Poste. She has a head on her shoulders, and she uses it. When a calamity arises, when a problem needs to be solved, she doesn’t swoon or moan. She rolls up her sleeves and gets to it. Her antidote is common sense. Cold Comfort Farm has been an excellent choice for this month's Reading Group. It's provided - forgive me - fertile ground for discussion about the art of parody, transcending parody and race and class in the 1930s. Less seriously, but probably more importantly, it's also been highly entertaining and extremely funny: just the book to see us through the darkest month. I'm glad it came out of the hat – and I'm grateful to the readers who nominated it.As always I enjoyed the ‘Inquisitor clues’ and was happy to be led round the grid in a particular way according to what clues I could solve. I ended with the six words in the 7 x 3 sector that included SCRAWNY, NEWCOME and the two blank cells. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking her cosy. Gibbons was a sworn enemy of the flatulent, the pompous and the excessively sentimental, and long after she ceased writing herself, she kept a commonplace book by her bed in which she recorded the literary crimes of others. In her lifetime, moreover, her fans included the very-far-from-cosy theatre critic Kenneth Tynan (it was his ambition to out Cold Comfort Farm on the stage), Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna Everage) and Noël Coward. In Westwood there is a character called Gerald Challis – a playwright whose self-regard could not be more painfully swollen if it contracted mumps – whom Gibbons based on a now largely forgotten writer, Charles Morgan. Morgan had made the mistake of once having argued that writers, even Shakespeare, did not require a sense of humour; Gibbons responded by making him the butt of all her best jokes. This is a very funny book. I don't know how far funny takes us. Is funny alone enough to make a book great? Minutes into the Future: Yes, oddly, the novel is actually set in a projected future with videophones and references to the "Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of '46". This aspect has little impact on the plot and is easy to forget - but it's probably why Flora's love interest has his own plane. Miss Stella Gibbons’s novel has been most favourably reviewed. It is a well-sustained parody of the Loam-and-Love-child school of fiction.

Modern Classics are often written as an antithesis to the ridiculously long Classics, yet condensation is not always welcome. Gibbons does it very well here and with a humour that is both mild and forthcoming. It is a Modern Classic with no grudges except, perhaps, just a desire to be a little more to the point. There is probably much to be said for such an explanation. But, when this linguistic moment is set alongside other similarly outré, bizarre or counter-logical notes, such as those I briefly described earlier, which sound in Auden's poems of 1939, then it seems right to add that some other point – a point about poetry itself – is being made simultaneously with a point about the psyche. In the year when the Second World War began, Auden's poetry keeps returning in varying fashions to this 'monstrous' mode of yoking dissimilarities (Yeats and the Duke of Wellington, Toller and Aunt Ada) violently together without attempting to synthesize or harmonize the dissonances. Last week, I described Cold Comfort Farm as a virtuoso send-up of early 20th century "loam and love child" books. But this isn't how most people read it. Mary Webb and friends are increasingly distant memories, after all, and you don't need to read a parody to see the funny side of DH Lawrence's novels. There are other reasons Cold Comfort Farm endures, as a contributor called Dowland pointed out: Flora begins to worry about Elfine, who is apparently in love with Richard Hawk-Monitor, the scion of country gentry who live nearby. There is soon to be a ball in honor of Richard’s twenty-first birthday, and Flora arranges an invitation for Elfine, with herself as chaperon. The Starkadders expect Elfine to marry Urk, a farm cousin. Flora secretly grooms the girl and gives her private instruction in good taste and deportment. Elfine makes a grand entrance at the ball. Before the night is over, Richard announces their engagement.Pearce, H. (2008) "Sheila's Response to Cold Comfort Farm", The Gleam: Journal of the Sheila Kaye-Smith Society, No 21. Gibbons also displays a tender side. There is real sadness in some of her characters, instead of deliberately heightened rural dolour – and it winds up as a love story that would please Jane Austen. Flora Poste cannot abide a mess. After her parents died and left her with only 100 pounds a year, she decided to live off relatives for a while. She settles on some cousins, the Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex. When Flora arrives at the farm, she sets out to make some changes and tidy everything up, even if it means upsetting her strong-willed aunt, Ada Doom. Auden's 1939 string of elegies and farewellings – 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats', 'In Memory of Ernst Toller', 'September 1, 1939', and 'In Memory of Sigmund Freud' – contain some curiously discordant notes, as if there were some anarchic or nihilistic principle in them struggling against the ostensible protocol of solemnity. The psychiatrist immediately recognises this situation, and I have been relying on Aunt Ada Doom for many years for an example of traumatic fallacy. Spread by post-war Hollywood, owing something to battle neurosis and more to psychoanalysis in the USA, the notion that all long-standing psychiatric symptoms must have been initiated by a traumatic incident in early childhood is so embedded in our culture that most patients, at least those with anxiety symptoms, take it for granted. Behind their distress, their language reveals the plea to find the ‘real’ cause, after which everything will magically improve. It may also relate to the depressive nature of some symptoms, that the sufferer is in some way bad in their essence, with their own original sin, and throws an emphasis on the past. It also reveals the passive and pessimistic nature of these patients, since the past cannot be changed.

Overly-Long Gag: Aunt Ada's copy of the "Milk Producers' Weekly Bulletin and Cowkeepers' Guide", which she uses to pommel every person she's irritated by during the Counting. Thanks Augeas– mercifully not too taxing: I have an awful lot else going on with work right now. I’m not sure I can really add much about the title of the puzzle. a b c Hammill, Faye (2001). "Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars" (PDF). Modern Fiction Studies. 47 (4): 831–854. doi: 10.1353/mfs.2001.0086. JSTOR 26286499. S2CID 162211201.

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When I have found a relative who is willing to have me, I shall take him or her in hand, and alter his or her character and mode of living to suit my own taste”.

Fond of Victorian novels ( “They were the only kind of novel you could read while you were eating an apple.”), Flora observes her relations as people whose situations can be improved and she relies on her “common sense” ( with her copy of "The Higher Common Sense" as reference) to proceed to exact change in the lives of her cousins to save them from a life of doom and gloom. Aunt Ada constantly refers to having witnessed something "nasty in the woodshed” when she was a child and insists on keeping tabs on her family, holding them to living on the farm ( “there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort”). As the narrative progresses, we see what begins with Flora making small changes in the daily lives at the Farm slowly evolves into a full-scale overhaul of the way of life for those at Cold Comfort Farm. Extremely funny--a parody of great English classics, by authors such as Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb, the Brontë sisters and D.H. Lawrence. Gothic novels with their romance enveloped in doom and suspense are harpooned by wit and humor. Intellectuals and the literary community are satirized too. Urk in the book doesn't even try to hide how eager he is for Elfine to come to age so he can ravish her, since he's been fixated on making her his bride since the night she was born. Thankfully, Flora steps in and arranges Elfine to be married to a boy closer to her age, and Urk (after some brief wailing) settles on Mariam the hired girl, who is just as eager to have him as he is to have her. When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex.

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In 1930 a young journalist called Stella Gibbons started a new job on the Lady, "the magazine for gentlewomen", where she applied her versatility as a writer to every subject under the sun, bar cookery, which was the province of a certain Mrs Peel. Soon after her arrival, however, Gibbons also began work on another, more exciting project, a novel – her "masterpiece", she jokingly called it – which she planned to write in spare moments, in a little room at the end of a passage in the Lady's Covent Garden offices. The book was to be a take-off of the "loam and love child" novels then so popular: novels such as Mary Webb's Precious Bane and Sheila Kaye-Smith's Sussex Gorse, in which earthy and primitive types, gloomy happenings and archaic rural landscapes are depicted in prose so overwrought that to call it purple would be a wild understatement ("the kind of story in which peasants have babies in cowsheds and push each other down wells", as Punch put it). She intended to call it Cold Comfort Farm. Judith Starkadder: Flora's cousin, wife of Amos, with an unhealthy preoccupation for her own son Seth Judith Starkadder: Amos’s wife whose main mission in life appeared to be moping around and being depressed. The phrase under her portrait on the front cover was “leave her to her misery”. The setting is isolated rural misery and emotional intensity of a Bronte novel hilariously no, not really reimagined in Sussex, with emotionally intense – if not crippled – characters are briskly put in to their places by a Jane Austen heroine, perhaps this is the plot of Emma slightly restructured. It is light and diverting, but not I felt funny.

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