Cold Comfort Inn
Stella Gibbons
1932
Around 310 pages
You wouldn't necessarily think a novel that parodizes a genre you've never read before could be funny or enjoyable. But hey, it's happened before! I adored Don Quixote without having read any chivalric romances. I also really liked this novel, despite never having read the "loam and lovechild" genre that Gibbons skewers (although I suppose it could be arguing she is putting Hardy in her crosshairs as well).
Newly orphaned Flora Poste is a sophisticated city mouse, but with no immediate prospects available (she is a woman after all), she decides to visit her distant relatives' farm. Her relatives take her into their poorly run farm in Sussex, and they are...eccentric, to say the least.
I read she is mainly taking on authors like Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith (who?). But she takes on the Hardy formula as well: country folks are as wild and deep as the English countryside, which we will spend 80 pages describing.
This is pretty funny, Flora Poste is a great satirization of our typical English leading lady, and you know how much I love when a female author is on the List. A nice break from war novels.
RATING: ****-
Interesting Facts:
The setting is the near future, shortly after the "Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of 1946". It refers to future social and demographic changes, such as the changing neighborhoods of London: Mayfair has become a slum and Lambeth is fashionable. The novel also contains technological developments that Gibbons thought might have been invented by then, including TV phones and air-taxis, so technically this is science fiction. Rad.
Adapted to television in 1995, with Ian McKellan and Kate Beckinsale.
UP NEXT: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Never heard of it!
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