Present Books In Favor Of Cold Comfort Farm
| Original Title: | Cold Comfort Farm |
| ISBN: | 0143039598 (ISBN13: 9780143039594) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Flora Poste |
| Setting: | Howling, Sussex, England(United Kingdom) Sussex, England(United Kingdom) England |
| Literary Awards: | Prix Femina Vie Heureuse (1933) |
Stella Gibbons
Paperback | Pages: 233 pages Rating: 3.91 | 39885 Users | 3150 Reviews
Itemize Containing Books Cold Comfort Farm
| Title | : | Cold Comfort Farm |
| Author | : | Stella Gibbons |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 233 pages |
| Published | : | March 28th 2006 by Penguin Classics (first published September 8th 1932) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. Humor |
Explanation To Books Cold Comfort Farm
Update I've just watched the film. It's even better than the book, by a long way. It's very affectionate, and very much played for gentle laughs. The cast is fantastic, some of the best actresses around including Eileen Atkins and Joanna Ab Fab Lumley, Stephen Fry and Ian McKellan. The attention to detail was stunning. Everything had been thought of - the lighting, colours and even face makeup of the women changed to reflect the lessening of the stranglehold Aunt Ada Doom had on the Starkadders and the lightness that Robert Post's child, Flora, brought to the farm. The ending was also an improvement on the 5* book. If you like British films, this is so typical of gentle British humour. In an earlier decade it would have been an Ealing film. I don't think it could have been made in the US as most of the actors weren't remotely good looking. Even Elvine, playing a mini Eliza Doolittle role (an obvious pastiche) was rather average and the sex-obsessed and over-fertile girl had been made up to look like an unwashed farm girl. Only Kate Beckinsale (who is not the world's most brilliant actress, although she was competent here, was allowed to be a beauty. I do recommend the film. And the book. Rarely do I see a film much better than a really good book, but this is it. John Schlesinger and Stella Gibbons, author and director, geniuses both. _______________________ When Aunt Ada Doom was just a small child, she saw "something nasty in the woodshed". And if it didn't blight her entire life, she certainly made sure it would blight, or at least add even more blight, to everyone else at Cold Comfort Farm, the family home and ancestral seat of the Starkadders. Essentially this is the American tv series, the Hillbillies rewritten for 1930s Sussex and parodying Hardy, Lawrence, and various other Great British Writers, but is more related to the Hillbillies with incest, hellfire, strange obsessions (cows) and all manner of people who all have mental or emotional problems of the darker, more malign sort. Into this maelstrom of petty evil, fear and ineptness, come the heroine. Flora Poste is the posh city cousin fallen on hard times whose father the Starkadders did something unmentionable to and feel guilty about so when she has nowhere to go, they take her in. But not willingly. She sorts them all out and brings them from their ignorant, Gothic-y insular life into the modern world. It is a ridiculously funny novel, not as literary as the parodying might suggest. I haven't seen the film of it, only just learned there was one, which was apparently brilliant and stars top British actors and actresses (as opposed to 'stars' famous more for their beauty than any thespian ability). Sometimes I don't want to see the film of a favourite book in case the director hasn't seen it the same way as I have, but this time I want to. Finished 26 Dec. 2011 Book review 19 May 2015 Film Review 24 May 2015Rating Containing Books Cold Comfort Farm
Ratings: 3.91 From 39885 Users | 3150 ReviewsAssessment Containing Books Cold Comfort Farm
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 to a lesser extent, D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy. I haven't read much by the former mentioned authors to appreciate the full extent of Gibbons jabs, but it doesn't matter because the humor is obvious. Gibbons writing was very clever and her cast of characters would have made Dickens proud. Very funny and very entertaining. 4.5If, like me, you've seen the 1996 movie adaptation of Cold Comfort Farm, with Kate Beckinsale, Ian McKellan, Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry and Rufus Sewell (mmmm yum!), you'll know that there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm and that Aunt Ada Doom saw something "narsty" in the woodshed when she was two. God I wish I had a memory like that! All the joys of the movie and more are in the book, a wonderful, clever, readable satire of the classic rural novel et al Thomas Hardy and the
Virginia Woolf is enraged, she writes to Elizabeth Bowen in 1932, that the esteemed Prix Etranger award has gone to someone named Stella Gibbons. "Who is she?" she asks. "What is this book?"The Starkadders were not like most families. Life burned in them with a fiercer edge.And when Flora Poste is flung among them in their great crouching, rotting farm, she immediately commences meddling. She aspires to write Persuasion, but she's more of an Emma herself - Emma accidentally transported to
I needed something funny to read and this did the trick. I can see why this book is a classic. Loved every page! Highly recommend. Five stars.
But her spirit was of that rare brand which becomes cold and pleased at the prospect of a battle, and her dismay did not last.In this short novel youll be treated to an extensive brassiere collection, a group of cows with the best names ever (Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless), and a mystery about something that must have been pretty darn nasty that happened in the woodshed. Youll be guided along by Jane Austen, D.H. Laurence, and a book I wish was real called The Higher Common Sense.
I needed something funny to read and this did the trick. I can see why this book is a classic. Loved every page! Highly recommend. Five stars.
Nineteen year old Flora Poste, freshly orphaned and impossibly jaunty, decides to live with strange, barely civilized relatives in rural Sussex. The Starkadders are a mix of fire and brimstone religiosity, untrammeled sexual urges, pathological family ties, feigned mental illness, and general slovenliness. Cold Comfort Farm is a 1932 parody of Thomas Hardy, the Brontës, and D.H. Lawrence, with themes of Pygmalion and the meddling of Emma Woodhouse thrown in, and jabs at Eugene O'Neill, avant
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