Showing posts with label Stella Gibbons. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Book Review 057 / Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons / A classic

Cold Comfort Farm

By Stella Gibbons

– a classic

1932

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 57 / Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

March 10, 2012

I have a confession to make – I love Cold Comfort Farm so much that I/we named my firstborn after two of the principal characters. I figured this would at least give him a great conversation opener when he finally gets interested in girls.

CCF is in my top three works of fiction of all time. On my desert island it would share a shelf with the Collected Works of Shakespeare, and, oh, probably the Gormenghast trilogy (if I could get away with having a trilogy).

The clichés about CCF are all, sadly, true. Stella Gibbons never wrote another word coming close to its genius, and the introductions to her recently reissued novels by Vintage acknowledge as much. That’s not to say her other work isn’t worth reading, (and I will write separately about Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, and Christmas at CCF) but you can never for a second forget that they are written by the same person who wrote Cold Comfort Farm. The contrast can be painful.

Beyond Cold Comfort Farm / Stella Gibbons' other works

Stella Gibbons

READING GROUP

Beyond Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons' other works

The 100 best novels / No 57 / Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

Her first novel has overshadowed all her other books, but there is much to relish in Gibbons' later catalogue

Sam Jordison

Friday 27 February 2017

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.

But something has been nagging at me as I've come to know more about the book and its author. Stella Gibbons might not thank us for focusing so completely on this novel, her most famous work. Her dazzling first novel made her name, but it also became a millstone. Late in life she described it as "some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but is often an embarrassment and a bore." She also lamented the fact that it had so eclipsed the 20-odd other novels, not to mention various collections of short stories and poetry, that she also published. Heard of Westwood? I can't say I had either until this month.Cold Comfort Farm overshadows most other novels from the 20th century too, so it doesn't seem entirely unfair that it should have had a similar effect on the rest of Gibbons' oeuvre. But reading about her uneasy relationship with this book – and her fondness for her others – piqued my curiosity, and so I thought I'd look at a few more things she's written.

Stella Gibbons

READING GROUP

Stella Gibbons

Cold Comfort Farm: old-fashioned humour and humanity

The 100 best novels / No 57 / Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

It's a parody that outlived the original objects of its scorn. Just why is Gibbons's novel so enduringly popular?

SAM JORDISON

Tuesday 17 December 2013

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:

The reason why CCF has survived so well is that it's a splendid book in its own right. You really don't need to know Lawrence or Webb's work to enjoy the book, since the characters and dialogue are so good. It's a bit like Three Men in a Boat or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the works they make fun of are mostly forgotten now, but the work stands on its own …

If a parody has nothing to say other than to mock a certain style which is current (and which has probably had its day, mostly by inferior copies of a once vibrant original), then it won't outlive the original. But like Blazing Saddles, Cold Comfort Farm is a parody that also manages to say something original. Also, it's funny!

Stella Gibbons / Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm / Review

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons – review

The 100 best novels / No 57 / Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

Nicholas Lezard

Tuesday 29 November 2011

o be honest, I only picked this book up out of a mixture of curiosity and charity. Everyone loves Cold Comfort Farm, and with very good reason, but even if they know that Stella Gibbons wrote about 30 other novels and umpteen short stories, they don't read them. So although a book with a spin-off CCF story comprising 17 of its 298 pages may look as though it is exploiting a reputation, we should at least honour the creator of the Starkadders.

Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons: Cold Comfort Farm was just the beginning

The 100 best novels / No 57 / Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

As welcome new editions of Stella Gibbons's lesser known novels are published, Rachel Cooke celebrates an author whose incisive wit extended far beyond the confines of Cold Comfort Farm

Rachel Cooke

Sunday 7 August 2011

n 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.

The 100 best novels / No 57 / Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 57

Cold Comfort Farm

by Stella Gibbons

(1932)

The book for which Gibbons is best remembered was a satire of late-Victorian pastoral fiction but went on to influence many subsequent generations

Robert McCrum
Monday 20 October 2014

tella Gibbons, who was born in the same year as Georgette Heyer and Stevie Smith, 1902, wrote more than 20 novels, and thought of herself as a poet. But she continues to be remembered, and in some quarters revered, for just one title, a jeu d’esprit that’s a brilliant parody of an inter-war genre of provincial, rural melodrama typified (at the high end) by DH Lawrence and, much lower down, by Mary Webb, author of titles such as Precious Bane and The Golden Arrow. Part of its immediate success was probably also due to the merciless contempt in which the young Gibbons (she was barely 30) held many generations of romantic/pastoral fiction. Or, indeed, the brisk way (with one, two or three asterisks) in which she humorously drew attention to the best bits in her narrative.

Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm while working for on the books pages of the Lady. Inspired, or perhaps provoked, by the fashion for novels set in remote rustic villages about sensitive young men with names like “Micah”, she set about demolishing a piece of treasured literary real estate whose origins can be traced to the late-Victorian novels of Thomas Hardy (No 29 in this series).

From its opening line – “The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged” – to Aunt Ada’s celebrated recollection of “something nasty in the woodshed”, Cold Comfort Farm has the air of a novel written, as it were, in one joyous exhalation, according to Gibbons, somewhere between Lyons Corner House and Boulogne-sur-Mer during the year spanning 1931/32.

The plot is simple. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19 when her parents are both carried off by the 1919 Spanish flu epidemic, is penniless. Her only option is to throw herself on the charity of her remote Sussex relatives, the Starkadders – Judith, her preacher husband Amos, their sons Seth and Reuben, several other cousins (Harkaway, Urk, Ezra, and Caraway) including the dominant matriarchal figure of aunt Ada Doom – all living, or partly living, in Cold Comfort Farm, Howling, Sussex. The Starkadders’ farm is an ominous place with a priapic bull, Big Business, and a hopeless herd of Jersey cows – Graceless, Pointless, Aimless, and Feckless – attended by several taciturn, brooding rustic inhabitants. Among some memorable comic set-pieces, cousin Amos preaching hellfire and damnation to the congregation of the Church of the Quivering Brethren is a high point.

As the rustic mayhem unfolds, Miss Poste, who is definitely a modern, metropolitan bossyboots, decides that it’s her mission to bring a metropolitan “higher common sense” to this benighted spot, and sets about trying to redeem the lives of her relatives. Aunt Ada will go flying to Paris. The memories of the woodshed will become domesticated, Miss Poste herself will eventually marry her country cousin, Charles Fairford, and everyone live happily ever after. Sort of. (It’s a comedy, remember?)

A note on the text

Stella Gibbons humorously disparaged her first novel as the work of a journalist trespassing on a higher calling from “the meaningless and vulgar bustle of newspaper offices”. Cold Comfort Farm was first published by Longmans in 1932, and was, according to the critic Lynne Truss, labelled “middlebrow”, to Gibbons’s disadvantage among the critics. But the book sold very well: 28,000 copies in hardback and 315,000 in paperback in its first 15 years. It won the 1933 prix étranger of the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse, and joined an informal canon of accidental English comic masterpieces. Unlike, for instance, Three Men in a Boat (No 25 in this series), another one-off classic, it found fans mainly in the British Isles. Its afterlife has influenced many writers and it is not fanciful, I think, to see in the film Withnail & I the novel’s lingering influence on later generations. Gibbons herself, in a Punch essay, “Genesis of a Novel”, compared her book to “some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but who is often an embarrassment and a bore”. Looking back, she was, she said, “filled by an incredulous wonder that I could once have been so light-hearted”.

Gibbons twice returned to the scene of her triumph, with Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), and again in 1949 with Conference at Cold Comfort Farm. Both flopped, and remain largely unread. Her Collected Poems appeared in 1950. She died in 1989 and there’s also a biography, Out of the Woodshed: The Life of Stella Gibbons by Reggie Oliver (1998). I’ve listed three prominent titles from among her many other books, all still in print.