She has a long-term plan, and it doesn’t include taking a job: She writes around to various relatives, since, as she tells her friend Mary, living off them seems the best option. Nineteen-year-old Flora Poste needs to find somewhere to live after the death of her parents, as she ‘is possessed of every art and grace save that of earning her own living’. ‘I think, quite without meaning to, I presented a kind of weapon to people, against melodrama and the over-emphasising of disorder and disharmony.’Īnd the epigraph that begins the book is from Jane Austen: ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.’ In a 1981 article in the Listener, Libby Purves quotes Gibbons as saying: It was also aimed at the excesses of DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy in their morbid romanticising and exaggeration of rural life, and there is a definite tilt at the Gothic in the form of the Brontës as well. The novel was written in reaction to the rural romances popular in the 1930s, particularly those of Mary Webb, whose work Gibbons, a journalist, had had to summarise for a magazine. Gibbons says at the beginning of the novel that it is set in the ‘near future’ though this only seems to manifest itself in television-phones and the preponderance of private aeroplanes.

Gibbons’s parody is a masterpiece of comedy in its own right.Ĭold Comfort Farm was first published in 1932.

Christmas at cold comfort farm book