The Country Life (novel) "The Country Life" won a 1998 Somerset Maugham Award, and was selected as one of the Notable Books for Adults of 2000 by the American Library Association. 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
Stella Gibbons familiar London milieu by setting the story largely in the wilder regions of Canada. This was the last of her books handled by Longmans; thereafter her work was published by Hodder and Stoughton. A journey to Austria and Venice in 1953 provided material for her novel "The Shadow of a Sorcerer" (1955). From 1954, having accepted an invitation from Malcolm Muggeridge, the editor of "Punch", Gibbons provided frequent contributions to the magazine for the following 15 years. Among these was a science fiction story, "Jane in Space", written in the style of Jane Austen. Gibbons, who wrote the introduction to