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. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19 when her parents are both carried off by the 1919 Spanish flu epidemic, is penniless. 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).įrom 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. Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm while working for on the books pages of the Lady.

Or, indeed, the brisk way (with one, two or three asterisks) in which she humorously drew attention to the best bits in her narrative. 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.

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. S 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.

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