Cold Comfort Farm - Sequels and Responses

Sequels and Responses

Sheila Kaye-Smith, often said to be one of the rural writers parodied by Gibbons in CCF, arguably gets her own back with a tongue-in-cheek reference to CCF within a subplot of A Valiant Woman (1939), set in a rapidly modernising village (Pearce:2008). Upper middle-class teenager, Lucia, turns from writing charming rural poems to a great Urban Proletarian Novel: "… all about people who aren't married going to bed in a Manchester slum and talking about the Means Test." Her philistine grandmother is dismayed: she prefers ‘cosy’ rural novels, and knows Lucia is ignorant of proletarian life:

"That silly child! Did she really think she could write a novel? Well, of course, modern novels might encourage her to think so. There was nothing written nowadays worth reading. The book on her knee was called Cold Comfort Farm and had been written by a young woman who was said to be very clever and had won an important literary prize. But she couldn't get on with it at all. It was about life on a farm, but the girl obviously knew nothing about country life. To anyone who, like herself, had always lived in the country, the whole thing was too ridiculous and impossible for words."

Kaye-Smith layers the ironies here within a subtext of contesting claims to authenticity. Not only does the older woman fail to recognise CCF is a comedy, but her family own farms and hires labourers and managers rather than actually working the land themselves; nor have they ever had to try to make a basic living from their own manual labour. Like the heroine of the novel, Kaye-Smith herself was a middle-class townie who moved to a small village, where she converted an old oasthouse to a large modern home. However Kaye-Smith generously allows Lucia to succeed: her novel The Price of Bread is published (by a left-wing book club) and becomes a success.