Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by English author
Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as
Mary Webb. Gibbons was working for the
Evening Standard in 1928 when they decided to serialise Webb's first novel,
The Golden Arrow, and Gibbons was given the job of summarising the plot of earlier instalments. Other novelists in the tradition parodied by
Cold Comfort Farm are
D. H. Lawrence,
Sheila Kaye-Smith and
Thomas Hardy; and going further back,
Mary E Mann and the
Brontë sisters.
Cold Comfort Farm won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 88 on the BBC's survey
The Big Read.