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
Simon Gibbons Simon Gibbons Simon Gibbons is Professor of Medicinal Phytochemistry and Head of the Department of Pharmaceutical and Biological Chemistry at The UCL School of Pharmacy. He was the 2005 recipient of the Phytochemical Society of Europe Award for Phytochemistry, the 2012 Pharmanex Prize and was a Fellow of The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health. In 2010 he was appointed to the Home Office Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) as the Chemistry Council member and is Chairman of the ACMD's Novel Psychoactive Substances Work Group (NPSWG) which is tasked to look at the area of 'legal high' Novel