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Description

This is an auction for COLD COMFORT FARM by Stella Gibbons.

Illustrated by Quentin Blake.

From Wikipedia:

"COLD COMFORT FARM parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb. Gibbons was working for the Evening Standard in 1928 when they decided to serialise Webb's first novel, The Golden Arrow, and had the job of summarising the plot of earlier instalments. Other novelists in the tradition parodied by COLD COMFORT FARM are D H Lawrence and Thomas Hardy; and going further back, Mary E Mann and the Bronte sisters. The heroine, Flora, stays at Aunt Ada Doom's isolated farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex. As is typical in a certain genre of romantic nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature, each of the farm's inhabitants has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred or fear, and the farm is badly run. Flora, being a level-headed, urban woman, applies common sense to their problems and helps them adapt to the twentieth century. The speech of the Sussex characters is a parody of rural dialects and is sprinkled with fake but authentic-sounding local vocabulary such as mollocking (Seth's favourite activity, undefined but invariably resulting in the pregnancy of a local maiden), sukebind (a weed whose flowering in the Spring symbolises the quickening of sexual urges in man and beast); and clettering (an impractical method used by Adam for washing dishes, which involves scraping them with a dry twig) . . . "