Judith invites Flora to make Cold Comfort Farm her home. After receiving several uninteresting replies, Flora is intrigued by a gloomy response from her cousin Judith in which Judith hints that the Starkadder family owes Flora recompense for some wrong done to Flora’s father. She decides to write to distant relatives and ask for a place to stay in exchange for her small annual income. Flora has a decisive personality and likes life to be orderly in all respects. She identifies with the upper class, but she has inherited very little money on which to live. A few other scenes offer internal monologues conducted by Adam, Aunt Ada, and Judith.Īs the tale opens, 20-year-old Flora Poste has recently been orphaned. The story is told using a limited third-person narration from the viewpoint of the novel’s protagonist Flora Poste. However, most of the story unfolds at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex. The action begins in London, and several subsequent scenes take place in the city. Given the book’s publication date, the reader can assume that the year is 1931. The events described in the novel take place over a five-month period from February through June. Although Gibbons wrote 22 more novels and several collections of poetry, her subsequent work never matched the success of her first book.

Neither of the spinoffs achieved the same success as the original story. The sequel was titled Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1949). A prequel called Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940) consisted of a series of short stories. Gibbons wrote two more books about the characters from Cold Comfort Farm, the primary setting of the novel named in the title.

Flora cold comfort farm