When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex. At the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm, she meets the doomed Starkadders: cousin Judith, heaving with remorse for unspoken wickedness; Amos, preaching fire and damnation; their sons, lustful Seth and despairing Reuben; child of nature Elfine; and crazed old Aunt Ada Doom, who has kept to her bedroom for the last twenty years. But Flora loves nothing better than to organize other people. Armed with common sense and a strong will, she resolves to take each of the family in hand. A hilarious and merciless parody of rural melodramas, Cold Comfort Farm (1932) is one of the best-loved comic novels of all time.
"Unquestionably. That’s why I chose it. It’s very funny and very good and it is, without a doubt, taking the piss. Oh yes, it’s all there: hysteria, paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sexual repression and its opposite—I’m not sure quite what we should call that nowadays. And it’s very, very funny—it’s a kind of pastiche. There’s a bit, which I can quote by heart because I’ve always found it hilarious, when the character called Mr Meyerburg, or ‘Mr Mybug’, a would-be writer who is after Flora, says: ‘I’m a strange, wild, moody sort of a brute but there’s something there if you care to dig’. And the next line is simply: ‘Flora did not care to dig.’ That, in a way, sums up Stella Gibbons, who, on the one hand, gives you a wickedly funny pastiche of all the possible psychological complaints people might be suffering from at the time, plus a kind of brusque refusal to become involved in it on the part of Flora. Well, the point about Flora is she’s the representative of common sense and the rational mind; all members of the family on the farm are representations of the unruly aspects of the unconscious. You could, if you wanted, say that Flora is the rational ego and the rest of them are the id, and the something nasty in the woodshed is a parodic version of Freud’s unconscious. But the remedy here is not deep analysis; the remedy is brisk common sense and rational adjustments. Gibbons is also parodying the development of a kind of self-involvement which I think has continued to develop in our own society, a sort of over-interest in one’s own position and personality. So her novel is a social comment as well—you could say it’s a political novel, too, in that it’s debunking the trend towards over-individualism."
