Others see John Cowper Powys's rural mysticism as a further target, as featured in his Wessex novel Wolf Solent (1929): 'He felt as if he enjoyed at that hour some primitive life-feeling that was identical with what those pollarded elms felt.' The farm-obsessed Reuben's original is in Kaye-Smith's Sussex Gorse, and the Quivering Brethren on the Colgate Brethren in Kaye-Smith's Susan Spray. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars', the works of Sheila Kaye-Smith and Mary Webb are the chief influence: she considered that the farm is modelled on Dormer House in Webb's The House in Dormer Forest, and Aunt Ada Doom on Mrs.

According to Faye Hammill's 'Cold Comfort Farm, D. Inspirations Īs parody of the 'loam and lovechild' genre, Cold Comfort Farm alludes specifically to a number of novels both in the past and contemporarily in vogue when Gibbons was writing. Flora, being a level-headed, urban woman in the dandy tradition, determines that she must apply modern common sense to their problems and help them adapt to the 20th century – bringing metropolitan values into the sticks. The inhabitants of the farm – Aunt Ada Doom, the Starkadders, and their extended family and workers – feel obliged to take her in to atone for an unspecified wrong once done to her father.Īs is typical in a certain genre of romantic 19th-century and early 20th-century literature, each of the farm's inhabitants has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred, or fear, and the farm is badly run. She decides to take advantage of the fact that 'no limits are set, either by society or one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose on one's relatives', and settles on visiting her distant relatives at the isolated Cold Comfort Farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex.

It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb.įollowing the death of her parents, the book's heroine, Flora Poste, finds she is possessed 'of every art and grace save that of earning her own living'. 0-14-144159-3 (current Penguin Classics edition)Ĭold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932.

Gibbons stella