There is nothing worse, for Flora, than things being boring. Flora is forever fending off suitors who are in love with her, including Mr Mybug, who she identifies with a shudder as an author straight away. Mybug, who has come to the peace and quiet of the rural lifestyle to write, is working on a book about how the Brontë sisters passed off their brother Branwell’s stories as their own – because no woman could possibly have written Wuthering Heights.įlora’s central amusement is to interfere in situations which take her interest. Flora Poste, a socialite with no apparent means of support other than £100 per year, is a parasitic orphan who descends on her only living relations, the Starkadders, at the aptly-named Cold Comfort Farm because she does not care to get a job. It is too hard not to laugh in the wrong places once you reach ‘a certain age’.)Īnyway, Gibbons’ spoof is brilliant. I read and loved everything of his when I was a young woman, but like Tchaikovsky who is great when you want to wallow in your own adolescent misery, Lawrence is a taste best savoured in youth, IMO. (Though I have to confess to having ‘grown out of’ Lawrence. The fact that these are three of my favourite authors makes the comedy all the more enjoyable. It is a delicious satire of the British rural novel, lampooning Jane Austen’s marriage machinations the doom-laden stories of Thomas Hardy and the daft sexuality of D H Lawrence. This was a book that I seem to have known about forever, one whose memorable phrases bled into the vocabulary of our family because my parents had read it when they were young. I finally got round to reading this book, which has been on my wishlist for ages and my TBR ever since it was released in Australia as a Popular Penguin.

Author of cold comfort farm