Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

When Flora Poste is 20, her parents die within a few weeks of each other of the flu. Flora’s father had always been considered a wealthy man, but after he died, it was discovered that there was no property and very little money for Flora to inherit.  She would have 100 pounds a year, which, of course, was insufficient for a young woman to live on.

Being unequipped by her ‘expensive, athletic and prolonged’ education for earning a living, Flora writes to all her relatives asking them to ‘take her in’. She receives an affirmative reply from her cousin Judith at Cold Comfort Farm, and goes off to the Sussex countryside to join the household.

She finds a farm in decay, full of miserable family members. In her no-nonsense way, she takes the farm and its inhabitants on as a project and proceeds to make their lives into what she perceives they need to be.

This book is a parody of the romanticized, often doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time this novel was published in 1932.

260 pages