Its occupants are nearly insufferable: Mr. Poor, lovely Viola has been left penniless and alone after her late husband’s demise, and is forced to live with his family in their joy less home. Recommended for both literary and popular collections.Ī sly and satirical fairytale by the author of Cold Comfort Farm Unavailable for decades, Stella Gibbons’s Nightingale Wood is a delightfully modern romance ripe for rediscovery by the many fans of Cold Comfort Farm. Anne Massey’s skillful rendering of a variety of accents will make this story more accessible to American audiences. The other half is Gibbons’s wicked sendup of romantic cliches, from the mad woman in the attic to the druidical peasants with their West Country accents and mystical herbs. Flora’s confident and clever management of an alarming cast of eccentrics is only half the pleasure of this novel. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19, chooses to live with relatives at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex, where cows are named Feckless, Aimless, Pointless, and Graceless, and the proprietors, the dour Starkadder family, are tyrannized by Flora’s mysterious aunt, who controls the household from a locked room.

In Gibbons’s classic tale, a resourceful young hero*ine finds herself in the gloomy, overwrought world of a Hardy or Bronte novel and proceeds to organize everyone out of their romantic tragedies into the pleasures of normal life.

Christmas at cold comfort farm book