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
Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation employees are white ethnics whom the locals hold in contempt. Baum fills the town with colorful characters, and the girls realize that all people are unique and quirky, and not to be judged as "the masses." He also brings back the character of private detective Quintus Fogerty, introduced in "Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society", to help resolve plot complications. Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation is a 1912 novel by L. Frank Baum, writing under the name "Edith Van Dyne". Baum's intended title was the more accurate "Aunt Jane's Nieces in Journalism", but the publisher changed