(This is what the movie version did.) Setting this bizarre problem aside, the book is fairly straight forward. If you ignore them and mentally reorient the story to the 1930s, it works a lot better. The book is littered with references to phones with TV screens and wars that never happened. Written in 1932, Gibbons (for some reason I still don’t understand) chooses to set her story at least a couple of decades into the future.

This may be because I have a warped sense of humor, but I was chuckling every few pages as I read it.

In the case of Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, we’re pretty much left with asking, “But is it still funny?” I’m happy to report: It is. When the book in question is about 80 years old and it satirizes a genre that we don’t see much anymore, it gets harder to make a judgment. You have to look at how well it hits its mark. But Victor’s intentions towards the young widow are, in short, not quite honorable.The thing-well, one of the things-about satire is that judging the book is more than just a matter of critiquing the plot, the style, and the characters. Only the prospect of the upcoming charity ball can lift her spirits especially as Victor Spring, the local prince charming, will be there. Withers dismisses her as a common shop girl and Viola’s sisters in law, Madge and Tina, are too preoccupied with their own troubles to give her much thought. Its occupants are nearly insufferable: Mr. Poor, lovely Viola has been left penniless and alone after her late husband’s demise, and is forced to live with his family in their joy less home. Recommended for both literary and popular collections.Ī sly and satirical fairytale by the author of Cold Comfort Farm Unavailable for decades, Stella Gibbons’s Nightingale Wood is a delightfully modern romance ripe for rediscovery by the many fans of Cold Comfort Farm.

Anne Massey’s skillful rendering of a variety of accents will make this story more accessible to American audiences. The other half is Gibbons’s wicked sendup of romantic cliches, from the mad woman in the attic to the druidical peasants with their West Country accents and mystical herbs. Flora’s confident and clever management of an alarming cast of eccentrics is only half the pleasure of this novel. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19, chooses to live with relatives at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex, where cows are named Feckless, Aimless, Pointless, and Graceless, and the proprietors, the dour Starkadder family, are tyrannized by Flora’s mysterious aunt, who controls the household from a locked room. In Gibbons’s classic tale, a resourceful young hero*ine finds herself in the gloomy, overwrought world of a Hardy or Bronte novel and proceeds to organize everyone out of their romantic tragedies into the pleasures of normal life.

Novel by stella gibbons