Cold Comfort Farm by Stella GibbonsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Part of my 2020 Social Distancing Read-a-thon
Have you ever read a book in which the characters made you want to shake them? To take them aside and lecture them about how life actually works? If so, then this is the book for you! Our heroine, Flora Poste, is economizing by going to stay with her rural cousins for a while and whilst doing so, she sets their lives to rights.
The Brontes get mocked gently, with the ethereal Elfine running wild on the landscape until Flora takes her in hand and forbids poetry writing. No time for Gothic romances, Flora makes sure that Elfines courtship runs smoothly.
Authors like D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, with their agonized male characters, are also razzed mildly, in the person of Seth Starkadder, the local Lothario. Flora recognizes his masculine appeal will make him a star and arranges for him to meet a Hollywood mogul.
The young woman who helps out around the Starkadder home gets taken aside by Flora and instructed on the usefulness of birth control and the resident religious fanatic is convinced to go preach to the masses, leaving the farming to those who are better at it. Plus, an aspiring writer gets married off and has access to all the sex that he has heretofore only been able to obsess about.
Very entertaining.
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