''It's sort of an indirect appeal to the shopping public. An ageing suffragette is interviewed by a sleek, wealthy young career woman as part of a cunning advertising campaign. These are freshly exhumed ice-core samples from 1930s England, a time of uncertainty and unease. There is, as Alexander McCall Smith says in his honest and informative introduction, the period detail. These include the friend of a woman in the grip of an inappropriate fancy who is obliged to act as a go-between: 'the wretched Dorothy, who was, by now, on the edge of collapse and fathoms deep in frightful lies …'Īnd yet there is something else that makes these stories engrossing.

She may not be doing the rural comedy routine, but there are still flashes of great comic writing, typically occurring when secondary characters are suffering moments of high exasperation. However, this is a perfectly legitimate artistic impulse and, more importantly, this is Stella Gibbons, and anyone capable of writing Cold Comfort Farm is not to be dismissed.

This does not make them sound very appealing, and it would be foolish to gloss over the fact that there is a very small-c conservative approach at work here. Recurring themes include: women who are about to leave their husbands but change their minds at the last minute superficially dull men who turn out to be excellent choices of husband and trendy modern people who are revealed to be vacuous twits when exposed to the unforgiving light of traditional values. This comes as no surprise once you've read them. The other 15 stories appeared in magazines such as the Lady, Good Housekeeping, and the Bystander.

Cold comfort farm book review