The Country Life (novel) The Country Life (novel) The Country Life is a comedic novel by Rachel Cusk, first published in 1997, which draws on Stella Gibbons' "Cold Comfort Farm" and Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre". It won a 1998 Somerset Maugham Award. The novel is a comedy that draws on both "Cold Comfort Farm" by Stella Gibbons and "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë. Stella Benson, the first-person narrator, abruptly abandons her life in London to take a position as carer to Martin, the wheelchair-bound teenage son of the wealthy and eccentric Madden family, in a farm near a small village in rural Sussex. The
Stella Gibbons a leading voice in the "Georgian" poetry movement, began to publish Gibbons's poems in his magazine, "The London Mercury". Squire also persuaded Longmans to publish the first collection of Gibbons's verses, entitled "The Mountain Beast", which appeared in 1930 to critical approval. By this time her by-line was appearing with increasing frequency in the "Standard". As part of a series on "Unusual Women" she interviewed, among others, the former royal mistress Lillie Langtry. The paper also published several of Gibbons's short stories. Despite this evident industry, Gibbons was dismissed from the "Standard" in August 1930. This was ostensibly an economy