Cold Comfort Farm was published by Longmans, Green in 1932. It won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and has never been out of print — ninety years of continuous popularity for a novel that parodies a genre (the rural Gothic of Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith, and their imitators) that most readers have never encountered in the original. The parody transcends its target: the novel is funny even for readers who have never heard of Precious Bane.
Flora Poste is twenty, orphaned, possessed of an excellent education, a small income, and an absolute confidence in her own judgment. She decides to live with relatives — the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex — because she intends to write a novel someday and needs experience of life. What she finds at the farm is a household of theatrical dysfunction: Aunt Ada Doom (who saw “something nasty in the woodshed” as a child and has used this trauma to tyrannize the family for decades), the brooding Seth (whose sexual magnetism destroys women), the evangelical Amos (who preaches hellfire to his tiny congregation), the fecund Elfine (a wild child who runs on the downs), and various other Starkadders afflicted with passions appropriate to a Hardy novel.
Flora’s response to all this Gothic excess is cheerful, systematic intervention: she sends Amos to America to preach, gets Seth into films, teaches Elfine to dress properly and marry a local gentleman, and finally coaxes Aunt Ada Doom out of her room and onto an airplane. Each resolution is absurdly easy — which is precisely the joke: the “problems” of Gothic rural fiction (sexual repression, religious mania, ancestral curses) dissolve instantly when confronted with practical common sense.
Gibbons marks the more purple passages with asterisks (one to three stars, indicating the degree of fine writing) — a device borrowed from Baedeker travel guides and applied to literary prose with devastating satirical effect.
Collecting Cold Comfort Farm
First edition (Longmans, Green, London, 1932): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Signed first edition: $400–$1,000
- Without jacket: $30–$60
- Penguin paperback (1938, among the earliest Penguins): $20–$50
A perennial bestseller and one of the funniest English novels of the twentieth century. The 1995 BBC film adaptation (starring Kate Beckinsale) introduced it to a new generation and boosted first edition values substantially.