Her plans for her future are quite clear: to collect material for a future novel while living off relatives. Much of the humor is of the fish out of water type, our fish being the urbane, rational heroine, Flora Poste, an extraordinary busybody who likes to set people straight. On reading the book now these details, particularly the air travel, present more of a curiosity than anything else.īut Gibbons’s gift for comedy, her ability to turn on a dime from slapstick (occasionally) to affection, and her wry, authorial voice make this book shine. The preferred method of transport for the affluent is by private plane, air travel having supplanted cars. Gibbons mentions that there has been an Anglo-Nicaraguan war which, it’s suggested, has been devastating for Flora’s generation, just as World War I (and the subsequent influenza epidemic) must have been for her readers. Webb isn’t read much these days, but the hilarious awfulness of Gibbons’s purple prose and her absurd characters are still funny.Īnother strike against the book might be that it is set in an England of the future-Gibbons’s future, that is.
And, as she explains in her introduction to the novel, she employs a system of asterisks to alert the reader to her “best” passages. This article allows you to compare and contrast Webb, Lawrence, and Gibbons at her gleeful best. Lawrence, at the other end of the literary spectrum. She ruthlessly skewers authors like Mary Webb, whose melodramatic tales of country life featured “ripe prose, daft dialogue and fondness for rutting”-a style also attributed to D. Part of Gibbons’s appeal to 1930s readers was her parody of contemporary literature, both lowbrow and highbrow. Although the author Stella Gibbons continued as a journalist, poet and writer for many more decades, it’s still her greatest-and only-mainstream hit. It’s the sort of book that you loan to friends and never see again (it’s happened to me twice). It’s one of the funniest books ever written and has never been out of print, entertaining one generation after another.
It may sound like the beginning of a nineteenth century novel about a plucky orphan finding her way in the world, although “expensive, athletic and prolonged” is something of a giveaway. That’s the opening of Cold Comfort Farm, a classic British novel published in 1932 and still going strong. The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.
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