Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics)

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I noticed another freakish note, this time in 'In Memory of Ernst Toller'. In that poem, written in May 1939, after Toller, whom Auden knew fairly well, had hanged himself in a New York hotel, Auden ponders the possible reasons for Toller's suicide. He wonders whether some early trauma was the ultimate cause: 'Did the small child see something horrid in the woodshed | Long ago?' I however am now cured of my previous opinion and am prepared to admitted that Stella Gibbons and Nancy Mitford were two separate people. Latin omne ignotum pro magnifico est means everything unknown is taken as grand; it is from Agricola, by the Roman historian Tacitus (circa 56-circa 120 AD). In the film, Rennet is washed in a cattle-trough as part of the spring-cleaning, and subsequently catches the lovelorn eye of the farm's new master. Following the death of her parents, the book's heroine, Flora Poste, finds she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She decides to take advantage of the fact that "no limits are set, either by society or one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose on one's relatives", and settles on visiting her distant relatives at the isolated Cold Comfort Farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex. The inhabitants of the farm – Aunt Ada Doom, the Starkadders, and their extended family and workers – feel obliged to take her in to atone for an unspecified wrong once done to her father.

The part that I hate so much about Jane Austen novels is that the female characters tend to just sit around, doing nothing to improve their situations, usually complain about the male figures, and wait around to be rescued. word abroad. Aunt Ada Doom grows wilder. Soon Urk drags Meriam out the door, bellowing that since he lost Elfine he will take Meriam. Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Flora counts "Seth" and "Reuben" among these. You'll never guess what her cousins are called. Mr Meyerburg (whom Flora thinks of as "Mr Mybug"): a writer who pursues Flora and insists that she only refuses him because she is sexually repressed; he is working on a thesis that the works of the Brontë sisters were written by their brother Branwell Brontë Cold Comfort Farm has been an excellent choice for this month's Reading Group. It's provided - forgive me - fertile ground for discussion about the art of parody, transcending parody and race and class in the 1930s. Less seriously, but probably more importantly, it's also been highly entertaining and extremely funny: just the book to see us through the darkest month. I'm glad it came out of the hat – and I'm grateful to the readers who nominated it.

Seth initially makes a move toward Flora, although the implication seems to be that Seth will pursue any woman, cousin or not. For example, the Yeats elegy is filled with some fanciful Tennysonian echoes, which seem to hint at an odd analogy between the Irish poet and the Duke of Wellington. And the gravely preoccupied and anguished 'September 1, 1939' (so much in the news recently; I suppose, given that Auden said he finished the poem on 3 September 1939, one could say that the poem was completed 70 years ago today) begins with evocations of Ogden Nash's insouciant poem, 'Spring Comes to Murray Hill'.

The psychiatrist immediately recognises this situation, and I have been relying on Aunt Ada Doom for many years for an example of traumatic fallacy. Spread by post-war Hollywood, owing something to battle neurosis and more to psychoanalysis in the USA, the notion that all long-standing psychiatric symptoms must have been initiated by a traumatic incident in early childhood is so embedded in our culture that most patients, at least those with anxiety symptoms, take it for granted. Behind their distress, their language reveals the plea to find the ‘real’ cause, after which everything will magically improve. It may also relate to the depressive nature of some symptoms, that the sufferer is in some way bad in their essence, with their own original sin, and throws an emphasis on the past. It also reveals the passive and pessimistic nature of these patients, since the past cannot be changed. Elfine: an intellectual, nature-loving girl of the Starkadder family, who is besotted with the local squire Richard Hawk-Monitor of Hautcouture (pronounced "Howchiker") Hall 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?" For, if she lived at Cold Comfort as a guest, it would be unpardonable impertinence were she to interfere with the family's mode of living; but if she were paying her way, she could interfere as much as she pleased."Fond of Victorian novels ( “They were the only kind of novel you could read while you were eating an apple.”), Flora observes her relations as people whose situations can be improved and she relies on her “common sense” ( with her copy of "The Higher Common Sense" as reference) to proceed to exact change in the lives of her cousins to save them from a life of doom and gloom. Aunt Ada constantly refers to having witnessed something "nasty in the woodshed” when she was a child and insists on keeping tabs on her family, holding them to living on the farm ( “there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort”). As the narrative progresses, we see what begins with Flora making small changes in the daily lives at the Farm slowly evolves into a full-scale overhaul of the way of life for those at Cold Comfort Farm. What is strange about this is that the question in this very depressed, subdued poem is couched in terms provided by a flagrantly comic novel of the period. Cold Comfort Farm, published by Stella Gibbons in 1932, is the story of the orphaned Flora Poste's stay with her relatives the Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm in Howling, Sussex. The novel relates Flora's attempts to help the inhabitants of this strange outpost of madness in the heart of the English countryside become just slightly less eccentric. I mean seriously, oh my god! It's funny. Flora (our protagonist) is a feminist queen of getting sh*t done and not taking anything from any man ever in the history of time. All the characters are hilarious. The language and voice are unreal. I want to live inside this book!!!!!

But Flora is a tidy person: "Unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable all about one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes." So she promptly sets about tidying things - tidying things for Hardyan rake Seth, Pygmalion-ready Elfine, brimstone-breathing Amos, and even for poor Aunt Ada Doom (name your cat that) who saw something nasty in the woodshed*, which does beg the question, has there ever been anything in a woodshed that was not nasty? Don't say wood. Leave wood in a woodshed for ten minutes and it's teeming with centipedes. In Cold Comfort Farm, Flora Poste is orphaned as a 20-year-old woman. When her friend suggests that she get a job, she replies that she would rather bum off her unknown relations. Then, when Flora writes to her relatives, she has certain expectations about her accommodations—she wants her own room and someone to meet her at the train. Needless to say, Flora rolls up her sleeves and gets to work, finding each of the main characters a more suitable outlet for their energies and obsessions, while fending off the libidinous Hampstead intellectual Mybug (quite possibly modelled on DH Lawrence) who has designs upon her virtue.One of the disadvantages of the almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favourite writers. It gave one a funny feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wearing one's favourite dressing gown. I'm inclined to regard her attempts to mould the Starkadders in the same way. She's out for fun, rather than on a moral mission – and we should feel the same. Mary Beard may be right that the book isn't "entirely nice", but she's possibly taking Flora too seriously. A telling moment comes when Flora's friend Claud comes to visit: "How you do enjoy yourself, don't you, Florence Nightingale?" says Claud. Flora retorts: "I do … and so do you."

Woolf was – not for the first time – quite wrong. Of the winners of the Prix Étranger from this interwar period, only two are remembered in 2011 – the other is her own To the Lighthouse – and only one, Cold Comfort Farm, can claim to have introduced a phrase to our everyday language: when people talk of having seen "something nasty in the woodshed", they're referencing, whether they know it or not, the Starkadder family's presiding recluse, Aunt Ada Doom, who was driven mad by just such a vision as a child. As expressions go, I personally find this one exceedingly useful.Gibbons is a little too pleased with herself by the end, which goes on like the last scene in Star Wars. We still have questions. Did the goat live? Will anyone ever find Graceless's leg, which fell off and no one even noticed for half a day?