Cold Comfort Farm

All signs point to fall: dried leaves fluttering down from the trees, a teensy nip in the evening breeze, goldenrods blooming (six weeks till frost!), and of course, that familiar hankering to pick up a Jane Austen novel. I guess it's partly a holdover from the back to school mentality that us college English majors can never quite get rid of, or maybe it's the fact that fall and winter encourage the return to a focus on home and domesticity. Either way, last fall it was Northanger Abbey, and I'm thinking this fall it will probably be Emma.

But, it's only September, which to me, still qualifies as late summer. Calendar gods aside, I don't really consider it officially fall until October. So, in the interest of saving Emma for October, I've decided to go with a more modern novel of English country manners in the form of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm. This 1932 comic novel centers around an orphaned young woman, Flora Poste, who is looking for relatives to live with, and ultimately decides upon some distant cousins who live in the isolated Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex. Upon arrival, she discovers a hodgepodge of extended family with various problems and eccentricities, and makes it her mission to bring civilized order to this chaotic rural existence. Perfect for a rainy September day, no?