![]() ![]() The novel contains delicious examples of local dialect and of parodied rural expressions. Gibbons would never reveal what the ‘something nasty’ was but it represents childhood trauma, whether real or imagined, and the way its ‘victims’ use it to excuse their behaviour. Aunt Ada Doom claims to have seen it when she was ‘no bigger than a titty wren’. Reference to Cold Comfort Farm usually triggers the famous quote that there was ‘something nasty in the woodshed’. Lawrence: note, for example, the characters Mr Mybug and Seth Starkadder. ![]() There are passages which mock the style of D.H. ![]() Stock characters – the religious bigot, the overbearing matriarch, the local Lothario etc. Writers such as Mary Webb irritated her, so she offered an alternative vision of country living. Gibbons felt that the genre of the rural novel – ‘The Loam and Lovechild School of Fiction’ - had run its course and offered itself to parody. Her family seemed partial to creating scenes, but with a clear thread of pretence running through their ‘performances’. When she was just eleven she had to talk her father out of committing suicide, and was astonished to realize that he was actually relishing their melodramatic conversation. The author, Stella Gibbons, had grown up among weird relations. Cold Comfort Farm is the amusing story of Flora Poste, a sensible young woman from London who goes to live with relatives in Sussex, the eccentric Starkadders. ![]()
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