THE FOLIO SOCIETY

After her father's funeral Flora Poste takes stock of her assets - one hundred pounds per year and a pair of beautiful eyes. Clearly she will have to throw herself on the mercy of relatives. Unfortunately the only ones available are the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm: the volatile and formidable Great Aunt Ada Doom, hell-fire preacher Amos, listless Judith, smoulderingly sexy Seth, impossibly fey Elfine, brothers Urk and Ezra (one foxy, the other horsey), dotty Miriam et al. Undaunted and armed with a copy of that indispensable book 'The Higher Common Sense', Flora applies herself to sorting out what must surely be the most squalid rural slum in all England.

‘Every woman needs Cold Comfort Farm. Under the pretext of sending up a specific genre - the rural miserabilists from Hardy to Mary Webb - it mocks and demolishes every kind of emotional wallowing." ’Do you want to break my heart?’ – ‘Yes’, said Seth with elemental simplicity. The porridge boiled over". In Mr Mybug, it also demolishes the wannabe intellectual’s tiresome obsession with self and sex as Flora, dainty and disdainful, exposes him as a mere bore. Flora likes things quiet and tidy: she is the part of us that we hang onto when we feel ourselves emoting, resenting and ranting like a Starkadder. When she was very old, I met Stella Gibbons. She told me how she wrote the book when she was young and unhappy, torn by an emotional family and by her own heart. She read bits of it to her girlfriends in a Lyons Corner House and they hooted with laughter and felt better. Nearly eighty years later, it still works.’