But it is also a parody of the ‘town’ novel – Flora and her friend Mrs Smiling shop, go ice-skating and to the cinema. Break.’Ĭold Comfort Farm is a masterful parody of the type of rural novel written by Mary Webb et al and is a wonderful parody of life on a failing post WW1 farm in the Sussex Downs. His gaze was suddenly edged by a fleshy taint. Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins, like slow yeast. His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. ‘*** The man’s big body, etched menacingly against the bleak light that stabbed in from the low windows, did not move. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.’ ‘** Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. Stella even marks her parodying passages, helpfully, with asterisks! She can in fact ‘do’ any style including the overblown stuff favoured by writers like Ethel M. She wrote many other novels but Cold Comfort Farm was her first and by far the most successful. Stella Gibbons trained as a journalist but thought of herself as a poet.
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