Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

STELLA DOROTHEA GIBBONS , novelist, poet and short-story writer, was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard. Her first publication was a book of poems, The Mountain Beast (1930), and her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Amongst her other novels are Miss Linsey and Pa (1936), Nightingale Wood (1938), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1949), The Shadow of a Sorcerer (1955), The Snow Woman (1969) and The Woods in Winter (1970). Her short stories include Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Beside the Pearly Water (1954). Her Collected Poems appeared in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb, who died in 1959. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

LYNNE TRUSS is a writer and broadcaster. The author of three novels and numerous radio comedy dramas, she spent six years as the television critic of The Times, followed by four years as a sports columnist on the same newspaper. She won Columnist of the Year for her work on Womans Journal and is now a familiar voice on BBC Radio 4. In 2002 she presented Cutting a Dash, a well-received Radio 4 series on punctuation, which led to the writing of the international bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which has sold over 3 million copies worldwide and was Book of the Year in 2004. Her most recent book is Talk to the Hand.

STELLA GIBBONS

With an Introduction by LYNNE TRUSS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in 1932
Published in Penguin Classics 2006
1

Copyright Stella Gibbons, 1932
Introduction copyright Lynne Truss, 2006
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

In March 2002, a desperate chap called Brian posted a message on a mainstream literary internet forum, in the very slim section devoted to the author Stella Gibbons. Hey! he wrote. Does anyone know where I can find a book report on the book Cold Comfort Farm? Ive tried every site! Sparknotes, cliffsnotes, pinkmonkey, everything! Please email me if you can help me. Its my senior book report, and its due in two weeks. Thanx, Brian. Three days later, he received the following reply from a correspondent named (rather improbably) X. Y. Zedd: Heres a great idea. Write your own! The book is worth it. At which pithy expression of excellent good sense, of course, one could only applaud, while muttering censorious, old-codgerish comments about the casual plagiarism that appears to come so naturally to the young.

However, even X. Y.s cheerfully practical solution didnt quite clear up the matter; unresolved questions still flapped urgently around the room. Because Brian had put his finger on something a bit peculiar. Cold Comfort Farm is a masterpiece. It has been adapted for stage, radio and screen, and there are people in literary households who routinely reproach their offspring, Oh, child, child, was it for this that I cowdled thee as a mommet? regardless of the childrens ability to appreciate advanced literary allusion. Many authors are devoted to Cold Comfort Farm. I was once on a literary radio quiz, and my co-panellist Sue Limb could not only lovingly outline the plot of Cold Comfort Farm in the 30 seconds provided, but name the date of publication (1932) and give the first words accurately from memory: The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged. Yet, until Gibbonss nephew Reggie Oliver published a biography of his aunt in 1998, there was almost nothing written about this most popular of authors. Of her twenty-three other novels, not one is in print. On another site recently, I clicked on Books about Gibbons and found the following list, cruelly itemized: For the General Reader No results. For Scholars No results. For Undergraduates No results. For School Students No results. So that was that, then. Like the hapless Brian, I must write my own book report and be brave about it. But I was still resentful on Stellas behalf. Was it for this that she cowdled Cold Comfort Farm as a mommet? Surely, as X. Y. Zedd had put it so succinctly, the book is self-evidently worth it?

My own history with Cold Comfort Farm is not the usual one. I did not discover it independently when I was ten years old, laugh at the names of the cows (Graceless, Pointless, Feckless and Aimless), and re-read it once a year ever afterwards, each time letting more of its humour reveal itself to me. No, for many years, in fact, I held back from Cold Comfort Farm; I was suspicious. Here was a book that was generally described as a wicked parody of the rural novels of Mary Webb (Precious Bane, The Golden Arrow), which were immensely popular in Britain between the wars, but had since sunk rightfully into obscurity. Evidently it was a hilarious conceit on the part of Gibbons to take a bright young practical metropolitan woman Flora Poste and insert her into a gloomy loam and lovechild setting with characters named Seth and Reuben, a farm that crouched in a hollow of the Sussex Downs like a beast about to spring, a lot of far-fetched rural vocabulary (rennet-post, sukebind, etc.), and an old, mad woman called Aunt Ada Doom who controlled her family with the melodramatic eruptions, There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort! and the immortal, I saw something nasty in the woodshed.

In my pre-enlightened days, I took the view that one couldnt enjoy a parody (even a wicked one) if the targeted genre was deader than a doornail which was a bit small-minded of me, I admit. However, I now believe I was merely acting on shockingly bad critical information because, while ColdComfort Farm was, yes, specifically inspired by the excesses of the rural genre (which is broad enough, in any case, to include such familiar authors as Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence), the huge delight of Stella Gibbonss novel is the way Flora approaches an eternal and universal difference of temperament: as a brisk, cheerful person, she discovers a whole farmful of people wallowing, self-thwarted, in chronic misery and simply makes them stop it. Old Adam Lambsbreath has been mournfully clettering the dishes with a thorn twig for many decades. Flora recommends a nice little mop with a handle, and buys one for him when she next goes to town. Flora is like Lewis Carrolls Alice, unintimidated by people who talk nonsense, refusing to be drawn into their mad world.