Cold Comfort Farm Cold Comfort Farm Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb. 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
Stella Gibbons a relatively faithful account of her childhood and early adult life with, according to Oliver, "only the thinnest veil of fictional gauze cover[ing] raw experience". "Miss Linsey and Pa" (1936) was thought by Nicola Beauman, in her analysis of women writers from 1914 to 1939, to parody Radclyffe Hall's 1928 lesbian novel "The Well of Loneliness". Gibbons's final prewar novels were "Nightingale Wood" (1935)—"Cinderella brought right up to date"—and "My American" (1939), which Oliver considers her most escapist novel, "a variant of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen"." Gibbons always considered herself a serious poet rather than a comic writer.