Cold Comfort Farm by British author Stella Gibbons (1902– 1989) is a comic novel that satirized the over-romanticized rural novel of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

It was said to be a send-up of what was called the “loam and lovechild” genre, poking fun at purple prose by deliberately including passages even more purple. The book was an immediate critical and popular success.

In 1933, the novel won the prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Femina, which angered fellow British author Virginia Woolf, who felt that her friend, Elizabeth Bowen, was more deserving of that year’s prize. Read More→