“Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. In reading the novel, the location of an asterisk meant you were about to read a particularly florid description of something:
What is charming here is the way she indicates that she has asterisked certain passages (like a travel guide would) so the reader, or indeed an book reviewer, would know they were onto something really impressive.
Gibbons starts the book with an imaginary letter to a friend editor, introducing her novel. There is a local writer who is determined to fall in love with Flora and keeps describing all the local fecundity in an attempt to woo her. She wants to make Elfine a lady and marry her off, Amos to get out the way by going on a preaching tour, and Seth to learn some manners and control. Rather than being depressed about the problems of the household, Flora sets about to fix them all.
Father Amos is a hell fire and brimstone preacher, mother Judith is constantly grieving over Seth, Elfine runs wild across the hills and Aunt Ada Doom masterly keeps the entire family in her control by pretending madness whenever necessary. Not surprisingly, when she arrives there is both a Seth and Reuben in the household who early impressions suggest will live entirely up to her fears. Her London friends are appalled by the thought, convinced they will be awful people, including either a Seth or a Reuben who will undoubtably be all on about sex. She swiftly decides the only course of action to her is to turn to extended relatives and live off them, for, “I have already observed that, whereas there still lingers some absurd prejudice against living on one’s friends, no limits are set, either by society or by one’s own conscience, to the amount that one may impose on one’s relatives.” Enquires to the available relatives turn up only one real option at Cold Comfort Farm, home of the Starkadders, in Sussex. The education bestowed on her by them was “expensive, athletic and prolonged” and she “was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living”. This is not a situation that greatly troubles her as she hardly knew her parents. I must admit to my lack of knowledge of literature of this time, but even I can tell there is a fair amount of satire here and poking fun at various English classes, rural life and authors in general.įlora Poste is orphaned at 19. Published in 1932 by Stella Gibbons this amusing book is set ‘sometime in the near future’ (after the Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of ‘46) and reflects life in England in the 1930s.
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