Stella Gibbons

In Gibbons's classic tale, a resourceful young heroine finds herself in the gloomy, overwrought world of a Hardy or Bronte novel and proceeds to organize everyone out of their romantic tragedies into the pleasures of normal life. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19, chooses to live with relatives at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex, where cows are named Feckless, Aimless, Pointless, and Graceless, and the proprietors, the dour Starkadder family, are tyrannized...

Recently orphaned, Flora ignores the sage advise of Mrs. Smiley and moves to the country to live on a decrepit farm with her eccentric relatives, where she finds ample material for the novel she wishes to write.