Tidying Up

In April my book club chose to read the brilliant satire Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.  This book is an absolutely delightful read that pokes gentle fun at the novels of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and the Bronte sisters.  Flora Poste finds herself a penniless orphan at age 19 and decides to leave London and move to Sussex to live with her eccentric relatives at Cold Comfort Farm.  Reuben, like the dark and brooding Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, desperately wants to run the farm but his father Amos, a fire-and-brimstone preacher, refuses to relinquish control.  Seth, much like Alec from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, spends most of his time bedding the local maidens.  Elfine, like Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights, roams the moors pining for a nobleman from the neighboring village.  Judith, like Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, obsessively preserves every memory of her son.  Finally, Aunt Ada Doom, Cold Comfort Farm's own version of the madwoman in the attic from Jane Eyre, believes there is a curse on the farm and won't let anyone leave.  Flora believes that a tidy life is a happy life, both literally and figuratively, so she decides to take her relatives in hand and "fix" them and the farm with hilarious results.  Throw in a few cows named Aimless, Pointless, Graceless, and Feckless and you have a well-written and highly entertaining novel that I recommend to everyone (not just those who studied British literature in college).