Ruling the unruly roost is bedroom-bound Aunt Ada Doom who, when she was young, “saw something nasty in the woodshed” (a phrase the novel has bequeathed to the language), which she never misses the chance of reminding everyone about. Amos, the family patriarch, is a fire-and-brimstone preacher (think Joseph in Wuthering Heights) his wife, the misery-addict Judith, is obsessed with their no-good son Seth (a Heathcliff-Mellors mix) while the elderly farmhand, Adam Lambsbreath, practises such rural traditions as washing dishes with a twig (“clettering”) and looking after the cows named Graceless, Pointless, Feckless and Aimless. Indeed, Cold Comfort Farm is like having an Austen heroine stumble into an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, according to one perceptive critic.įlora Poste, a sophisticated Londoner orphaned at 19, goes to stay with distant cousins, the Starkadders, on their eponymous farm in the aptly named village of Howling. Aspects of her style, such as characterisation, power of description and cutting humour, caused her to be compared to Jane Austen. None of Stella Gibbons’s subsequent 22 novels achieved the same critical and popular success as this, her first.
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