And both are in the iron grip of the Aunt Ada Doom, the matriarch of the family who is a recluse and reputed madwoman who has spent decades hidden in her room after a traumatic childhood event. It is also a futuristic novel, set in the near future (from 1932), after the fictional Anglo-Nicaraguan War of 1946, in which there are TV phones, and people jet around in private planes, flying themselves here and there. Aunt Ada agrees and flies off to Paris on Elfine's wedding day. Place where the family matriarch, Aunt Ada Doom Starkadder, saw “something nasty” when she was a little girl. Howling.
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. The heavy regional style is made comic, for example, by Gibbons’s use of modern and fanciful names for the farm animals, such as bull named “Big Business,” the misconceived metaphors and similes (the sun “throbbed like a sallow lemon”), and the casual approach to calamity (the hired hand fails to notice when a cow loses a leg).
The Starkadders believe they must never leave the farm or Aunt Ada Doom will have one of her fits of madness, but Flora can see the madness as a little too convenient. To Flora, the great city represents normalcy in dress, action, speech, and attitude. Cold Comfort Farm Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to The farm is symbolic of a sentimentality toward the rural and old-fashioned, a place where a dishwashing “mop” is considered innovative and even a newspaper is disconcerting.
This Study Guide consists of approximately 43 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - Set primarily in Sussex, England, circa 1930s, Cold Comfort Farm is a parody of late eighteenth/early nineteenth century agricultural literature, such as novels by D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy. It has no train station and only one pub, the Condemn’d Man. These descriptions include anthropomorphized animals, plants, and buildings that serve as symbols of the human passions. After all Flora's meddling has come to fruition and the farm is tidied up, Flora seeks her own happy ending. This madness supposedly is the result of something Aunt Ada saw in the woodshed when she was a child. Great Britain’s capital city is mentioned but never lavishly described; London provides a contrast to Cold Comfort Farm. A direct and funny answer to D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and their disciples. Flora spends a day with her, managing to convince her there is a lot more fun to be had for a lady of wealth than being cooped up in a bedroom. Woodshed. Cold Comfort Farm Book Summary and Study Guide Detailed plot synopsis reviews of Cold Comfort Farm Cold Comfort Farm is a hilarious satire of the sort of rural romances that were popular at the time. Flora tackles each family member individually, despite Aunt Ada's distress: she changes her cousin Elfine from an artsy woodland sprite into a lady eligible for marriage to the wealthy man she loves; she helps her cousin Seth find a career in the talkies, his passion, through her Hollywood producer friend; she encourages religiously fanatic Uncle Amos to go on a preaching tour, getting him off the farm so her cousin Reuben can take it over as this is his greatest wish; and she sends her depressing Aunt Judith into therapy and off to explore European churches. She teaches the servant girl the advantages of family planning, suggests to Uncle Amos to take his fiery sermons to a wider audience on the road, buys poor old Adam a proper little mop to clean the dishes (in place of the twig he used previously) and dives into matchmaking with the lovely but wild young Elfine and a well-to-do young neighbor. Starkadder family farm to which Flora Poste moves. The hired girl, Meriam, is another major subplot. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question.
The farm is populated by stereotypical rural types, from the domineering matriarch to the hell-fire-and-brimstone preacher to the loyal family retainer. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. Cold Comfort Farm. Practical and meddlesome, Flora right away sets herself to the task of meddling with the lives of the inhabitants of the farm. It is not necessary to know that Gibbons is directly parodying the farmhouse in Mary Webb’s The House in Dormer Forest (1920) for readers to realize that the house embodies the darkness and complexity of the human relationships in the novel. One of the characters believes the farm is cursed, as seeds do not grow and the cows do not reproduce.
Taking its name from a line in William Shakespeare’s play King John (1596-1597), the farm is located outside the village of Howling, near Beershorn in southern England’s Sussex region. Abhorring messes similar to Jane Austen's Emma, Flora takes on the challenge to tidy up Cold Comfort Farm and everyone on it. Dark and dirty, the farmhouse is a maze with nooks, crannies, hidden doors, and inaccessible attics. She dispenses birth control advice to the hired girl, who gets pregnant once a year, and fashion and courtship tips to Elfine, who is in love with a local noble. Starkadder family farm to which Flora Poste moves. Cold Comfort Farm is a stinging satire and outrageously funny parody of the literature about rural English farm life, especially by Sheila Kaye-Smith, Mary Webb, and …
Little by little her urbane and unsentimental approach changes all around her, but one cloud still casts a shadow over everything and everyone. Therefore, it is to London that she takes Elfine to transform her into a woman fit for Richard Hawk-Monitor and where she takes Judith for psychiatric help.
The letter informs her that she is owed a debt for a long ago wrong done to her father, a debt now passed on to his only daughter, Flora. Even to reach Beershorn, the closest train station (which is seven miles from the farm), takes four and a half hours by train from London, even though the Sussex region is only about fifty miles from London. The nasty incident is never explained, and the reader never gets a description of the actual woodshed (it is not on Cold Comfort Farm, since Ada came from elsewhere when she married into the Starkadder family), but its presence haunts the novel. This study guide contains the following sections: This detailed literature summary also contains Topics for Discussion and a Free Quiz on The Downs. It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at … Fortunately, he meets one of the Starkadder women and marries her instead. Stella Gibbons’s 1932 classic novel, Cold Comfort Farm, is a satirical send-up of the romantic, sometimes melodramatic portrait of rural British life that was popular in the literature of the day. Meriam ends up marrying one of the farmhands. © 2020 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Cold Comfort Farm is a comedic novel, a gentle parody of romantic pastoral novels, of societal mores and the like. help you understand the book. Set in the 1940s, this story about a young orphaned girl … Like a fairytale, Charles, the man she loves, comes to pick her up in his airplane and they declare life-long love toward one another as they return to London. She discovers the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm are in a bad state as the farm is supposedly cursed and tightly controlled by the matriarch, Aunt Ada Doom, who never leaves her room. Click on a plot link to find similar books. She gets pregnant every spring when the "sukebind" blooms and has just had her fourth child by an unknown man. The main character, Flora Poste, is reminiscent of Jane Austen and Bronte heroines in many regards. Feb 28, 2009 Cold Comfort Farm is a delightful tale based on the book of the same name. The novel is best enjoyed by understanding it as a parody on rural literature and character archetypes as the story builds on a conventional structure toward a satisfying ending. The main character, Flora Poste, is reminiscent of Jane Austen and Bronte heroines in many regards. Intrigued, Flora immediately gets on a train to the farm, and upon arrival finds a dank, rundown shambles of a house and a family in an equal state of disrepair. She even manages, with application of travel and fashion magazines, to break Aunt Ada Doom's (who "saw something nasty in the woodshed" in her youth) hold on the family and the farm. Town one mile away from Cold Comfort Farm. There are a number of subplots that also take place. Orphaned and broke at nineteen, she decides to live with relatives she has never met on a farm in Sussex.
A writer staying in the nearest town, Mr. Mybug, develops a crush on Flora, but as he's rather fat and she doesn't care much for intellectuals, she does her best to avoid him. Of the replies, the most interesting is that from the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm. Flora teaches her about birth control which Meriam thinks is flying in the face of nature, but which her mother, Mrs. Beetle, condones. Flora's biggest problem is Aunt Ada Doom, but the farm will never really be tidy as long as she is brooding in her room. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers.
Cold Comfort Farm is generally considered to be a parody of the type of novel that British authors such as Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and Mary Webb wrote in the early twentieth century. When Flora Poste is orphaned, she goes to live with relatives in the country - relatives who will have her because of "the wrong done" to her father.
Set primarily in Sussex, England, circa 1930s, Cold Comfort Farm is a parody of late eighteenth/early nineteenth century agricultural literature, such as novels by D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy. (Critical Guide to Settings and Places in Literature). *London. The farm is described in long, adjective-filled phrases reminiscent of the lush description in regional novels of the period. There is a general sense of depression and gloom, the very farm appearing like "a beast about to spring.".
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