Her father Telford Gibbons, a successful doctor, was also an alcoholic and an emotionally manipulative bully. Over lunch at the Honeydew Cafe she would read out the latest sections to her friends, convulsed in giggles and would return from lunch 'drunk on orange juice and my power to make people laugh'.Īt one level, Cold Comfort Farm is an autobiographical novel: laughter was Gibbons's therapy, her way of exorcising the ghosts of an unhappy childhood. She would scribble away at it on the bus, in the park, on the train and even during office hours. Gibbons began work on Cold Comfort Farm after joining the staff of the Lady and, after a false start, as she later wrote, it 'seemed to write itself'. Although Gibbons went on to enjoy a long career as a novelist, the early success of her first novel eclipsed everything else that she wrote. It has been serialised many times on radio and more recently on television. Neck Judith is purged of her neuroses and packed off to Europe by the eminent psychologist Adolf Mudel Elfine abandons poetry and fairies for marriage to nice-but-dim scion of the local landowning family, Dick Hawk-Monitor and the 80-year-old Ada Doom, to her family's amazement, dons leathers and a helmet and flies off to a holiday in France.Ĭold Comfort Farm became an instant classic, winning a distinguished literary prize and an enduring audience. Amos goes off on a preaching tour of America Seth is whisked off to star in the 'talkies' by famous Hollywood producer Earl P.

Flora brings good sense, pragmatism, and new horizons. One by one she sorts out the tangled, brooding Starkadder clan: the messianic hellfire preacher Uncle Amos smouldering local sexpot Seth Seth's mother Judith, half-crazed with incestuous longings for him Elfine, a wayward 'child of nature' who roams the hills lisping poetry in a green cloak and a bad hairstyle and finally the iron-willed family matriarch Ada Doom, who deviously manipulates her entire brood with the emotional blackmail of relived childhood traumas (having seen 'something nasty in the woodshed'). Gibbons's novelistic debut tells how the self-possessed Flora Poste, orphaned at 19 by indifferent parents, decides to plant herself on her remote relatives the Starkadders, occupants of Cold Comfort Farm in darkest Sussex.įlora comes to Cold Comfort with a mission to bring order and happiness to their messy personal lives.

Cold Comfort Farm was an assured, sophisticated, risque literary satire-scarcely the province of a young female editorial assistant on the ultra-respectable Lady magazine. When Cold Comfort Farm was first published in 1932, at least one reviewer was convinced that 'Stella Gibbons' must be a pseudonym for the male novelist Evelyn Waugh.

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