This is a bit off my usual line (though 1930s middlebrow women writers are very me) .
A couple of weeks ago my local book group was discussing Stella Gibbons' 1934 classic Cold Comfort Farm (my suggestion) and I had a number of thoughts that I felt I might like to give a somewhat wider circulation.
For instance, the way people talk about Cold Comfort Farm as if it’s just a parody of a now obsolete and forgotten genre of literature. The defence wishes to point out that a foundational work of European literature by Miguel de Cervantes was taking the piss out of previous chivalric romances which nobody, apart from presumably a few specialists, reads these days and nobody says it’s not worth bothering with Don Quixote. It is, I depose, where you go with it and what you do with it and no literary work comes from nowhere, it is building on something the author already read or at least came across. A work can transcend being satire – the reader does not have to have read the things it's satirising, because it stands on its own. Furthermore, it is possible to contend that anyone subsequently wishing to write heavy-duty novels about rural life since Cold Comfort Farm has to be very careful indeed to ensure that reviews don’t immediately invoke the Starkadders. If that’s not literary influence I don’t know what is.
The few critics who have written on Cold Comfort Farm mention that Gibbons was greatly influenced by Jane Austen, given that the epigraph is from Mansfield Park, and Flora Poste’s ambition is ‘to write a novel as good as Persuasion’. It has also been mentioned that she is very like Emma, but a lot more successful in her machinations. However, they seem to overlook some perhaps more subtle Austen hommage: Flora is quite the composite of Austenesque characteristics: in a position of dependent relative not unlike Fanny Price, and in the end engaged to a clergyman who is a (second) cousin, a very on-trend match. She also channels Elinor Dashwood’s refusal of the compliment of rational response in her interactions with, among others, Mr Mybug.
The extent to which Stella Gibbons' own family were somewhat in the Starkadder vein, causing her to rebel in the opposite direction towards calm and order and downplaying tendencies to drama, has been commented on in her nephew Reggie Oliver's biography, Out of the Woodshed.
While Flora claims that she is gathering material for the novel that she intends to write in later life, in the course of the narrative she is actually rewriting the generic stories that the Starkadders are telling themselves, or at least giving them a gentle nudge in a new direction – e.g. pointing Amos at ‘one o’ they Ford vans’ to expedite his evangelising and get him away from the farm.
She moves the characters from being stuck as what EM Forster in Aspects of the Novel called ‘flat’ characters - in fact his example was almost certainly from Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Sussex Gorse (often considered one of works being parodied in Cold Comfort Farm)
A serious or tragic flat character is apt to be a bore…. One of the romances of a popular contemporary writer is constructed round a Sussex farmer who says, "I'll plough up that bit of gorse." There is the farmer, there is the gorse; he says he'll plough it up, he does plough it up, but it is not like saying "I'll never desert Mr. Micawber," because we are so bored by his consistency that we do not care whether he succeeds with the gorse or fails.
into more rounded and enjoyable existence:
There they all were. Enjoying themselves. Having a nice time. And having it in an ordinary human manner. Not having it because they were raping somebody, or beating somebody, or having religious mania or being doomed to silence by a gloomy, earthy pride, or loving the soil with the fierce desire of a lecher, or anything of that sort. No, they were just enjoying an ordinary human event, like any of the other millions of ordinary people in the world.
I did discover when I read Lynne Truss's Afterword to the Penguin Classics edition that she had a very similar insight:
Flora finds at Cold Comfort Farm a group of people who have been reduced to novelistic clichés…. She is a character in a novel who reads the other characters as characters and rewrites them as people.
There are layers beyond the obvious and very very funny satire of literary Loamshire, with its amazing verbal inventiveness. There’s also a point one could make that although Gibbons has a lot of fun with the asterisked purple passages of heavily symbolic description loaded with pathetic fallacy, there’s also a genuine feeling for the beauties of nature when they are not obliged to carry all that metaphoric weight.
It's a novel that I have been a great fan of for many decades. I am also a fan of Stella Gibbons' other, very different, novels, which are finally getting republished (after my years of pursuing secondhand copies).
