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A review by tasharobinson
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
4.0
This would have been a five-star review, except that the last few stories in the collection left such a sour taste in my mouth. For the most part, this is a witty, wry collection of stories from the author of Cold Comfort Farm, set in England between the 1920s and 1940s, and dealing often with the young-and-modern set and their parties, romances, and creeping sense of dissatisfaction with their social set and the choices they've made.
The contrast between modernity (which means a lot of different things here, from being studious and serious and non-frivolous to joining a social movement where everyone's supposed to get along with their exes) and "the past" (everything from light-hearted Algonquin Round Table partying to stiff social conservatism, depending on who's looking back) is a key theme here, with various generations and social classes failing to understand each other and judging each other, and quite a lot of smart, stable women realizing they're unhappy and would really be better off settling down with a nice man. These stories read like a blenderized version of Shirley Jackson, Dorothy Parker, and O. Henry, complete with sentimental romanticism, dry wit, and twist endings.
The Cold Comfort Farm prequel story is actually the least necessary one here — it takes place when at Christmas when Elfine is 12, and everyone in the family's being their usual forms of awful, but nothing new is revealed and it reads like a holiday-special fanfic. But virtually all the other stories are marvelously concise character studies, with quick action, lively writing, and one surprise monkey.
There were two big down spots for me. The first is "Cake," where a modern 1940 woman who chose her thriving career over having a baby is about to divorce her philandering husband. Then she meets a feminist pioneer who was famous nearly 30 years earlier, when she also chose her cause over having babies. The careerist sees the feminist is alone, lonely, and unfulfilled, so she rushes to take her cheating husband back and recommit to having his children. He responds by hitting her in the face for making him look like "a fool" in front of his mistress, and the careerist decides she "deserved it" and that he "ought to have done that two years ago and then I guess we'd have been all right." Sure enough, they have a baby and live happily ever after. It's a weirdly spiteful story about how women can't have political causes, jobs, or independence without giving up what really makes them happy, and it's at odds with most of the rest of the book.
And then there's "The Friend Of Man," where a beautiful young woman corners herself with a choice between a selfish, pretty young gadabout who only sees her as a useful ear for his endless whining about another woman, and an ugly, cloddish country man who isn't interested in anything she's interested in, but is Authentic and offers her a final shot at marriage. And it's meant to be triumphant when she picks the Authentic guy, but it's right up there with Reality Bites in the great scheme of narratives where a false choice between two Extremely Symbolic Guys should have been replaced with "ditch both of these bores and go meet some better people."
So yes, too many of these stories come to a somewhat forced "Marriage and babies, hooray!" endings that rather recall the end of the 2019 Little Women movie adaptation, with its "Stories about women are only allowed to end one way" rules. But most of them are sweet and funny and subversive about it, and for the most part, they provide such interesting windows into England between the world wars, and the conflict between movements and generations, and the mindset of people navigating rapidly changing social styles and friendship fashions while trying to be blithe and au courant. And mostly, these stories are even funnier and better-observed than Cold Comfort Farm itself. Now I'm very curious about Gibbons' other many novels, which get so much less attention.
The contrast between modernity (which means a lot of different things here, from being studious and serious and non-frivolous to joining a social movement where everyone's supposed to get along with their exes) and "the past" (everything from light-hearted Algonquin Round Table partying to stiff social conservatism, depending on who's looking back) is a key theme here, with various generations and social classes failing to understand each other and judging each other, and quite a lot of smart, stable women realizing they're unhappy and would really be better off settling down with a nice man. These stories read like a blenderized version of Shirley Jackson, Dorothy Parker, and O. Henry, complete with sentimental romanticism, dry wit, and twist endings.
The Cold Comfort Farm prequel story is actually the least necessary one here — it takes place when at Christmas when Elfine is 12, and everyone in the family's being their usual forms of awful, but nothing new is revealed and it reads like a holiday-special fanfic. But virtually all the other stories are marvelously concise character studies, with quick action, lively writing, and one surprise monkey.
There were two big down spots for me. The first is "Cake," where a modern 1940 woman who chose her thriving career over having a baby is about to divorce her philandering husband. Then she meets a feminist pioneer who was famous nearly 30 years earlier, when she also chose her cause over having babies. The careerist sees the feminist is alone, lonely, and unfulfilled, so she rushes to take her cheating husband back and recommit to having his children. He responds by hitting her in the face for making him look like "a fool" in front of his mistress, and the careerist decides she "deserved it" and that he "ought to have done that two years ago and then I guess we'd have been all right." Sure enough, they have a baby and live happily ever after. It's a weirdly spiteful story about how women can't have political causes, jobs, or independence without giving up what really makes them happy, and it's at odds with most of the rest of the book.
And then there's "The Friend Of Man," where a beautiful young woman corners herself with a choice between a selfish, pretty young gadabout who only sees her as a useful ear for his endless whining about another woman, and an ugly, cloddish country man who isn't interested in anything she's interested in, but is Authentic and offers her a final shot at marriage. And it's meant to be triumphant when she picks the Authentic guy, but it's right up there with Reality Bites in the great scheme of narratives where a false choice between two Extremely Symbolic Guys should have been replaced with "ditch both of these bores and go meet some better people."
So yes, too many of these stories come to a somewhat forced "Marriage and babies, hooray!" endings that rather recall the end of the 2019 Little Women movie adaptation, with its "Stories about women are only allowed to end one way" rules. But most of them are sweet and funny and subversive about it, and for the most part, they provide such interesting windows into England between the world wars, and the conflict between movements and generations, and the mindset of people navigating rapidly changing social styles and friendship fashions while trying to be blithe and au courant. And mostly, these stories are even funnier and better-observed than Cold Comfort Farm itself. Now I'm very curious about Gibbons' other many novels, which get so much less attention.