Englischsprachige Literatur

Gibbons Stella

Cold Comfort Farm

Penguin, 1938

Galbraith3

“Probably the funniest book ever written” Julie Burchill says in the Sunday Times. Well, this must be an example of truest, darkest British humour, and I´m sorry to say, I can´t join in.
The heroine, twenty-year-old Flora, a sophisticated member of the London in-people, loses her parents and her financial resources with them. She has to ask her dull and gloomy Starkadder relatives on Cold Comfort Farm to take her in.
Like the heroines in Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer novels she immediately takes over and changes the ruined life of every member of her new family. Of course, it is mildly funny, how one of her cousins leaves the farm to become a preacher, another finds his fortune as a lady-killer in the film business instead of making every female in the farm community pregnant. She arranges marriages, farm management and and finally sends evil old Ada Doom away on holiday.
Then she disappears from life in the backwoods to marry one of her London friends, a decision she could have just as well made at the beginning of the story. But then, of course, the book would not have been written.