Flora Poste is an elegant, sophisticated young lady living in glamorous London in the 1930s. She’s also an orphan, and her determined sense of order demands that she put her good taste to work and find a new branch of the family to fix. She settles on the oddest bunch she can find—an aunt, uncle, and cousins who live deep in the country on Cold Comfort Farm. Armed with her journal, several issues of Vogue magazine, and a tall pair of rubber boots, Flora sets out to drag Cold Comfort Farm into the modern fashionable age. This act of generosity proves a bit more challenging when Flora finds herself confronted with an over-sexed, moving-picture-obsessed cousin; an uncle who preaches until his congregation literally quivers in Fear of the Lord; a poetry-writing, free-spirited young sprite who’s in love with the dashing lord next door; and a great aunt who’s “seen something nasty in the woodshed.” A parody of the earthy, melodramatic novels of D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, Cold Comfort Farm is, quite simply, hilarious. The 1995 film version (starring Kate Beckinsdale as the no-nonsense, never-give-up Flora) wonderfully captures Gibbons’ sense of the odd, the eccentric, and the absurd, and genuinely brings the page to life.

posted Jun 2, 2009 at 2:46PM

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