Cold Comfort Farm: Penguin Classics

This is highly edited version of the book -- cuts it almost in half. I evidently didn't notice when I ordered that it is abridged..The book itself does not say it is abridged or edited. The original book is wonderful -- this version isn't. It reads at maybe 4th grade level. It deletes a whole lot (1/2 of the book worth) of the fun details that make the book interesting to read. After deleting 1/2 of the book, the "editor" then rewrote what was left. It's really appalling that this is sold under the original title with no explanation of the butchering that was done to the story. I'll probably throw it away so no one else has to read it, even by mistake.

As a big fan of all the Bronte sisters' works, I really appreciate the lovingly satirical style of this book. It's such a smart and funny novel and this Anniversary Edition with cover art by Roz Chast is perfection. Ms. Chast "GETS" the characters and her pictures are wonderful. I have the old Penguin version, but I NEEDED this edition with Roz Chast cover art for my very own. PLUS... as someone who's in the publishing business myself, I'd like to say that it's a well designed book. The text, set in Sabon font, is clear and easy to read, the margins and the style is well done, again clear and readable. It's a worthy edition to any library. I love it. (Oh, and someone wrote that it's abridged and it's not... maybe the audio version is (?), but the hard copy is exactly the same as my old Penguin classics version: PERFECT!)

A charming and amusing book. Perfect for just relaxing! Gibbons pokes fun at the heavily romantic, sweat-and-furrow writing popular in the 1920s. She contrasts town mouse Flora's pragmatic outlook with the Heathcliffish fatalism of her pastoral cousins, the Starkadders.There are a few caveats. Readers don't get to witness Flora's confrontation with Aunt Ada--the apex of the story. Readers are also deprived of how the love story develops between Flora and Charles. One minute, she "quite likes him," and the next, she plans to marry him.My third objection is that ALL the Starkadders and their neighbors are painted so stupid. Surely, among such a large group, someone would have a bit of brain, but Gibbons is content to merely typecast them. After you finish laughing, the prejudice shows through clearly, and you feel tainted.

I spent a lot of time in my late teens a 20s somberly reading all of DH Lawrence's dark, sensual, painful tales of the harsh conditions of English agricultural life and everybody's non-stop agony resulting from the Industrial Revolution. I didn't actually know that Cold Comfort Farm was a satire of this (I just picked it up because it appeared on a lot of "funniest books of all time" lists). Imagine my delight at reading how the lovely Flora Poste whirls in to vanquish all the Lawrencian sorrows (including cows whose legs spontaneously fall off) of Cold Comfort Farm. A wonderfully entertaining book, deserving of its position as one of our funniest pieces of literature. I just thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it!

I'd seen bits of the movie and wasn't all that interested in trying the book... But another book I liked very much was pointed out to be a bit of a nod to Cold Comfort Farm. And thus I was intruiged enough to hunt up a copy of Cold Comfort Farm and read it... And I very much enjoyed it! I loved the tongue in cheek management of people and situations, the figuring out what people were wanting, and helping organize it so they achieved their dreams... And I very much liked the point of how someone can hold others hostage by emotional blackmail and enjoy it -- it's very true and I dislike it enormously when it's being played out. So I enjoyed that the author pointed it out. And Flora was slightly terrifying, but very fun and good at what age was doing. Good reading!

It helps to know a little bit about English LIterature of the 19th century, but even without that background this story will keep you in stitches. I kept wanting to pigeonhole everyone I knew and read them quotes. Gibbons has a wonderful knack for finding just the right way to show up the ridiculousness in every character. On the one hand, the characters seem familiar and "types" but on the other hand, Gibbons gives them quirks and twists that make them stand out from all their predecessors in English Literature. From the names of the cows, to the repeating of stock phrases like "Something nasty in the woodshed," the author has a wonderfully original way of using the language.

Classic comedy from the last century that is still laugh out loud funny today. Big City girl goes to the country to live amongst very weird kith and kin and, primarily, to stir the pot and get them all out of their dull routines. Does she succeed? You'll have to read the book. WARNING: Don't drink coffee or any other staining beverage while reading this novel. Consequences from spontaneous outbursts could be disastrous.And if you think it's easy to get on the good side of Aunt Ada Doom, or big Business (the bull), or Viper (the horse), or even Adam who prefers to wash dishes with a stick, then you've got another think coming. Outrageous? Yes. And intended to be a great 20th C. send-up of the 19th C. "loam and lovechild novels" such as "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," the writing style of D H Lawrence, and plots and styles of lesser known novelists about English lovers of the soil and their invariably wronged women.Sadly, Ms. Gibbons hilariously poisonous pen has proven inadequate to the task of wiping out the overwrought romance fiction heroes with thick regional accents and the perpetually pneumatic heroines of today. The world of 21st C. fiction needs another Stella Gibbons.

I have no idea why it took me so long to find and then read this book. It's hard to believe it was written in 1932, the style of humour and the witheringly dry observations are so current. I won't churn out the plot again, as others have more than covered that along with a load of spoilers, but this book had me in stitches, Ok, it's wildly far fetched, but then the best humour so often is. Don't be put off by it being "a classic" or by the period when it was written, it could have been written last week, and it's a belting read!

This is not so much a review as a warning. You cannot fail to enjoy this book. It is undoubtedly a true classic and I need not add my approval to those more erudite than myself who have gone before me.However the Kindle edition which I recently purchased, by “ Reading Essentials” based in Victoria BC, Canada, was clearly proof read by an illiterate, or possibly not proof read at all. Any publisher who would allow the name of the author to be misspelled in the title page (Stella Gobbons!) deserves swift and certain bankruptcy. Nor do things improve thereafter.Dear Reading Essentials, send me a substantial fee and an editable version and I will try and avert this tragedy, for the sake of the superlative Ms Gibbons.

Flora Poste, expensively educated and possessed of every art and grace, save that of earning her own living, is left an orphan at the age of nineteen with no property and an income of only one hundred pounds per year. Temporarily lodging with a widowed friend, the brassiere-collecting Mrs Smiling, Flora makes the decision to visit her distant cousins, the Starkadders, at Cold Comfort Farm, Howling, Sussex, against the advice of Mrs Smiling, and in the hopes that she will be able to make a home with them. However, when the sophisticated, city-dwelling Flora arrives at the very aptly named Cold Comfort in the wilds of Sussex, and finds a whole host of eccentric and glowering relatives - cousin Judith with her lamentations of impending tragedy; Judith's husband, Amos, who preaches fire and damnation twice a week at the Church of the Quivering Brethren; their sons the taciturn and territorial Reuben and the darkly brooding and lustful Seth; the ethereally beautiful but unkempt Elfine, and not forgetting the demanding, dolally matriach Aunt Ada Doom who once saw "something nasty in the woodshed" - Flora's immediate response is merely to send a telegram to Mrs Smiling stating "Worst fears realized darling...send gumboots." Undeterred by the eccentricities and bizarreness of the characters she meets at Cold Comfort, the resourceful and practical Flora decides it is her mission to take each of her relatives in hand and to rescue them from ruin…Flora Poste, although she may appear to be rather too sure of herself for a nineteen-year-old and who tells us that “at the age of 53 or so I would like to write a novel as good as ‘Persuasion’, but with a modern setting, of course”, is nevertheless a very engaging character and how she deals with the weird and wonderful characters she encounters, makes this classic novel a very entertaining one indeed. Written in 1932, this parody of the rural melodrama (which sold particularly well when it was first published and won the 1933 Prix Etranger of the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse) is a novel that needs to be taken very much in the lively and satirical spirit with which it was written and, if done so, should provide most readers with a very amusing, and even laugh-out-loud read. For this reread, I chose the attractively presented new Penguin Classics Edition (2020), with an afterword by Lynne Truss, and this little book is going straight back into one of my bookcases to be read and enjoyed again. I can also recommend the DVD starring Kate Beckinsale, Eileen Atkins, Ian McKellen, Rufus Sewell, Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley, which won a BAFTA award and is an absolute hoot.5 Stars.

A young London sophisticate goes to sort out the lives of her barely civilised cousins in rural Sussex.Unlike many classic comic novels, Gibbons' greatest hit is actually very funny, cleverly spoofing not only superior Austen-esque heroines, but also rustic novels of the sub-Hardy variety. Crude and cruel characterisations sit amongst parodically florid (but highly elegant) prose, as Flora Poste deftly negotiates alien territory and charms even the formidable Aunt Ada Doom.A joy to experience, and beautifully done on all levels.

Yes, Cold Comfort Farm certainly had its faults. Though, actually, the author's knowledge of farming seems to have been rather thin on the ground. Who in their right minds would let a bull out into a field without consulting anyone? And did I detect just a little contempt for the men and women "of the soil"? All unwashed of course, and no doubt a bit whiffy, like the stuff Big Business used to produce before he became one of the happy, ever-smiling, ever-childlike flower crowd. No matter. The place had a smell and flavour of its own until it was converted into an insipid (though no doubt wonderfully smelling) blancmange by the irritating (to me) busybody Flora, who, at the venerable age of nineteen appears to have nothing left to learn in life. Personally, I preferred it the way it was. Perhaps it might change for the better in its own good time.