Read by Anna Massey

Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by Stella Gibbons, published in 1932.
It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life
popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb. Gibbons was working for
the Evening Standard in 1928 when they decided to serialise Webb's first
novel, The Golden Arrow, and had the job of summarising the plot of earlier
installments. Other novelists in the tradition parodied by Cold Comfort
Farm are D. H. Lawrence, Sheila Kaye-Smith and Thomas Hardy; and going
further back, Mary E Mann and the Bronte sisters. The book is set in the
near future.

Orphaned, destitute, and unwilling to get a job, 20-year-old Flora Poste
looks to her relatives for a place to live. She settles upon the Starkadders,
relatives on her mother's side, who live on the isolated Cold Comfort Farm,
near the fictional Sussex village of Howling. Greeting her as "Robert Poste's
child," they take her in to repay an unexplained wrong done to her father.

Each member of the extended family has some long-standing emotional problem
caused by ignorance, hatred or fear; and the farm is badly run - supposedly
cursed - and presided over by the unseen and ominous presence of Aunt Ada
Doom, who is said to have been driven mad by seeing "something nasty in the
woodshed" as a child.

Flora, a level-headed urban woman, applies modern common sense to their
problems and intends for them all to adapt to the twentieth century.

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