If You Love British Comedy, Try 'Cold Comfort Farm'

The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.

That’s the opening of Cold Comfort Farm, a classic British novel published in 1932 and still going strong.

It may sound like the beginning of a nineteenth century novel about a plucky orphan finding her way in the world, although “expensive, athletic and prolonged” is something of a giveaway. It’s one of the funniest books ever written and has never been out of print, entertaining one generation after another. It’s the sort of book that you loan to friends and never see again (it’s happened to me twice). Although the author Stella Gibbons continued as a journalist, poet and writer for many more decades, it’s still her greatest—and only—mainstream hit.