The firelight lit up his diaphragm muscles as they heaved slowly in rough rhythm with the porridge.įlora has her work cut out. Standing with one arm resting upon the high mantel, looking moodily down into the heaving contents of the snood, was a tall young man whose riding-boots were splashed with mud to the thigh, and whose coarse linen shirt was open to his waist.

And then there’s Cousin Seth, whose tongue-in-cheek introduction will spark recognition in anyone who’s ever read romance novels of any kind: There’s Cousin Reuben, who slaves away over the land with a fierce possessiveness his mother Cousin Judith, who is prone to weeping in her room at the sheer blankness of her life the ethereal, half-feral Elfine, who flashes through the house like a kingfisher’s wing and spends most of her time roaming the high Downs and Judith’s husband Amos, who preaches weekly sermons of fire and brimstone to the Quivering Brethren. The Starkadders are an eccentric clan who reel from one madness to the next, full of high emotion, rolling eyes and ponderous monologues. The farm is ‘ crouched, like a beast about to spring, under the bulk of Mockuncle Hill‘, not far from the ominous village of Howling (whose ‘frosted roofs’ are coincidentally, later on, also ‘like beasts about to spring’, though also ‘crisp and purple as broccoli leaves’). Brisk and no-nonsense, she realises from the start that Cold Comfort Farm has issues, being entirely too wild for its own good. A challenge lies ahead, to be sure, but nothing can stand up to Flora Poste once she’s set her mind to something.įlora comes from the elegant world of London life, full of intellectual dinners, over-intellectual plays (there are some funny pastiches of self-consciously ‘modern’ theatre) and and ironic attachments.

With her neat and organised mind, Flora sees very clearly that the Starkadders must be taken in hand and improved, for their own contentment and her own comfort. But even she is startled by the raw and elemental roughness she finds among her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm. From the shortlist, she selects the Starkadder family, descendants of her mother’s sister Ada, who live on a remote farm in Sussex. When her parents die, leaving her with a hundred pounds a year, she decides to impose herself on relatives rather than finding a job in London. Our heroine is Flora Poste, who has been expensively educated to ‘ possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living‘. As it is, I enjoyed it but found it a little too self-indulgent and showily clever.

I’ve a feeling it might be one of those books that I’ve read ‘too late’: that I’d have gelled with it much more readily if I’d read it as a teenager or young adult. I didn’t love Cold Comfort Farm as much as I expected to.

Cold comfort farm book