The happy ending she seeks for herself is indisputably a cosily romantic, rather than a stirringly ambitious one (although she does assert early on that she would like, at the age of 53 or so, to write 'a novel as good as Persuasion, but with a modern setting'.) But its sunlit, satisfying resolution ensures it will always be 'purest happiness' for me to see the cover of this old, trusted friend.– I really liked Erin Bow’s suggestion of a SNOT award for books (“given to STORIES NOT to be read ON TRANSIT, the SNOT shall honor and mark books that will make you ugly-cry while on a crowded cross-town bus”). At the book's conclusion, a triumphant Flora looks from a newly ordered Starkadder throng to her own hearth.

It may be parodying 'loam and lust-child' novels, but its characters' happiness remains as important to the book as its literary fun-poking. Gibbons enjoys herself enormously at the expense of people who insist on 'living life with a wild poetry', and are often to be discovered 'weeping on their bed' because of a tactless utterance at lunchtime.īut what I love most about CCF is its lightness of heart, as well as touch. *** indicates that the reader should really sit up and take note, standing by for deep, animal hungers, invented dialect vocabulary like 'mollocking' (a brilliant coinage for Seth's lustful misadventures), heavy loins and furrowed earth. Marriage and fulfilment, rather than death and disgrace, are high on the agenda – and good haircuts, smart clothes and liberal helpings of The Higher Common Sense (as preached by Flora's guru, the fictional but indispensible Abbé Fausse-Maigre) will help to make them happen.Įarly on in the novel, Gibbons blithely informs the reader that like Baedeker, she will use a system of asterisks to mark out particularly impressive passages. Where, for Webb or Hardy, a misstep, malformation or sin inexorably predicts a wasted, prematurely-ended life, or at least an awful lot of misery, Gibbons rolls up her sleeves and blithely enters the tragic landscape, tidying it up and setting things to rights. Once ensconced, she addresses herself to hygienic interference in the affairs of the clan: poetical, unkempt, sensationally beautiful Elfine amorous Seth, who secretly loves the talkies better than the myriad women he gets up the duff fiercely territorial Reuben and the unforgettable Great-Aunt Ada, who once saw 'something narsty in the woodshed' and has been reclining in bed ever since on four tray-meals a day, directing operations.Ĭold Comfort Farm is a parody of the doomy, tragic, close-to-the-earth gothic novels of writers like Mary Webb and DH Lawrence, and, earlier, Thomas Hardy.

Novel by stella gibbons