★★★½

OK, here’s the thing. I didn’t love Cold Comfort Farm as much as I expected to. I’ve a feeling it might be one of those books that I’ve read ‘too late’: that I’d have gelled with it much more readily if I’d read it as a teenager or young adult. Or maybe I was just in the wrong mood. As it is, I enjoyed it but found it a little too self-indulgent and showily clever. Our heroine is Flora Poste, who has been expensively educated to ‘possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living‘. When her parents die, leaving her with a hundred pounds a year, she decides to impose herself on relatives rather than finding a job in London. From the shortlist, she selects the Starkadder family, descendants of her mother’s sister Ada, who live on a remote farm in Sussex. Flora is prepared for rustic simplicity. But even she is startled by the raw and elemental roughness she finds among her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm. With her neat and organised mind, Flora sees very clearly that the Starkadders must be taken in hand and improved, for their own contentment and her own comfort. A challenge lies ahead, to be sure, but nothing can stand up to Flora Poste once she’s set her mind to something.

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