Novel
Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons · 1932
Synopsis
Flora Poste, nineteen, an orphan, has nothing to her name but a hundred pounds a year and prefers to live with relatives rather than work. She writes to several kinsfolk and chooses cousins in Sussex whom she does not know; they reply that they owe her reparation for an old wrong done to her father, without saying what it was. At the farm, everyone suffers noisily: the father announces damnation, the mother dotes on her youngest son, and the grandmother, who says she saw something nasty in the woodshed as a child, has not left her room for twenty years.
Context
The novel appeared on 8 September 1932 and targets the rural novel then in vogue, in which the land is fatal and passions inevitable. The most remarked device is typographical: the author marks her own lyrical passages with stars, in the manner of travel guides that mark monuments. A critic suggested that this author's name hid a satirical novelist who is also in this catalogue. The prize it received the following year outraged Virginia Woolf, who complained of it in a letter to Elizabeth Bowen.
Who it is for
About three hundred pages; translated into French as early as 1946, then reissued under a new title in 2016.
Prizes and reception
Crowned in 1933 with the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse, it is the only one of her books to have remained famous; her other novels have been reissued only recently.
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