Cold Comfort Farm Read Online Free

Chapter XIII ), but thinks better of it and takes her to see Mr Dan Langham in
On Your Toes!
at the New Hippodrome instead.
    In the end, the most important aspect of
Cold Comfort Farm
is how modern it is. The narrative voice is direct, the plot is simple, the comedy is completely undamaged by the passage of time, and the literary playfulness is awesome. Meanwhile, its underlying serious point about people invoking childhood misery – ‘I saw something nasty in the woodshed!’ – and using it as a means to exempt them from normal life, and have power over their families, is utterly relevant to the modern world, in which Dave Pelzer is patron saint of victimhood, and the genre now has its own special section in the bookshops. Reggie Oliver called the biography of his aunt
Out of the Woodshed
for a reason: Stella once wrote that she had not only created the woodshed, but was ‘practically born in the place’. But fortunately, she added, ‘The door happened to be ajar.’ 6 In the biography, Oliver recalls with pleasure a stage production of
Cold Comfort Farm
in which the biggest laugh went to the moment when the Hollywood producer, Mr Neck, is removing Seth from the farm, and runs into Aunt Ada Doom. ‘I sawsomething nasty in the woodshed!’ she cries. ‘Did it see you?’ he asks.
    Lynne Truss
    NOTES
    1 . Reggie Oliver, Out of the Woodshed: The Life of Stella Gibbons (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 37.
    2 . Ibid., p. 85.
    3 . Ibid., p. 123.
    4 . Faye Hammill, ‘Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars’, Modern Fiction Studies 47: 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 831–54.
    5 . Oliver, Out of the Woodshed , p. 129.
    6 . Ibid., epigraph.
A Note on the Text
    This Penguin Classics volume of
Cold Comfort Farm
has been set from the Allen Lane edition of 1938. It had first been published by Longman’s in 1932.
    Some minor housestyling to match Classics style has been applied. For punctuation, double quotation marks have been made singles (with doubles inside these as needed); un-spaced em-dashes have become spaced en-dashes and 2-em dashes are em-dashes; no full stop after personal titles (Mr, Mrs, Dr, St) or names at the end of letters; four-dot ellipsis become three; end punctuation follows end quotation marks when not a complete sentence or dialogue (e.g. pp. 11 l.1 and 12 l.33). For spelling, -is- words become -iz- (e.g., realize); hyphenated words now spelled as one (to-night, to-day, tomorrow, good-night, good-bye) are modernized but ‘good-morning’ becomes two words; ‘judgment’ becomes ‘judgement’; and the ligature is removed (‘Phœbe’ becomes ‘Phoebe’). A very few minor errors have been corrected: two commas removed from lists before ‘and’; ‘cow-shed’ standardized to ‘cowshed’ twice; the comma added after a house number twice and the hyphen to ‘Hawk-Monitor’ once. All else has been left in Stella Gibbons’s inimitable style.
    Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.
                               –M ANSFIELD P ARK .
    NOTE
    The action of the story takes place in the near future.
    To
ALLAN AND INA
Foreword
    T O A NTHONY P OOKWORTHY , E SQ ., A.B.S., L.L.R.
    M Y DEAR T ONY ,
    It is with something more than the natural deference of a tyro at the loveliest, most arduous and perverse of the arts in the presence of a master-craftsman that I lay this book before you. You know (none better) the joys of the clean hearth and the rigour of the game. But perhaps I may be permitted to take this opportunity of explaining to you, a little more fully than I have hitherto hinted, something of the disabilities under which I have laboured to produce the pages now open beneath your hand.
    As you know, I have spent some ten years of my creative life in the meaningless and vulgar bustle of newspaper offices. God alone knows what the effect has been on my output of pure literature; I dare not think too much about it – even now. There are some