Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (Unabridged)

Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm (Unabridged) - Read by Anna Massey Source Cassette Tape Duration approx 7:33 hours FhG MPEG 1 Layer III 64 Kbps CBR 44100Hz, 16-bit, Mono A bit of a "Curate's egg" I'm afraid, owing to the condition of a couple of the tapes the quality is variable, however overall it is fairly reasonable. The book Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by 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 had the job of summarising the plot of earlier installments. 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. The book is set in the near future. Orphaned, destitute, and unwilling to get a job, 20-year-old Flora Poste looks to her relatives for a place to live. She settles upon the Starkadders, relatives on her mother's side, who live on the isolated Cold Comfort Farm, near the fictional Sussex village of Howling. Greeting her as "Robert Poste's child," they take her in to repay an unexplained wrong done to her father. Each member of the extended family has some long-standing emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred or fear; and the farm is badly run -- supposedly cursed -- and presided over by the unseen and ominous presence of Aunt Ada Doom, who is said to have been driven mad by seeing "something nasty in the woodshed" as a child. Flora, a level-headed urban woman, applies modern common sense to their problems and intends for them all to adapt to the twentieth century. The author Stella Dorothea Gibbons (5 January 1902 – 19 December 1989) was an English novelist, journalist, poet, and short-story writer. Her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. A satire and parody of the pessimistic ruralism of Thomas Hardy, his followers and especially Precious Bane by Mary Webb—the "loam and lovechild" genre, as some called it—Cold Comfort Farm introduces a self-confident young woman, quite consciously modern, pragmatic, and optimistic, into the grim, fate-bound, and dark rural scene those novelists tended to portray. The reader Anna Raymond Massey, CBE (born 11 August, 1937 - 3 July 2011) is an English actress born in Thakeham, West Sussex, England, the daughter of British actress Adrianne Allen and Canadian-born Hollywood actor Raymond Massey. Her late brother, Daniel Massey, was also an actor. She is the niece of Vincent Massey, a Governor General of Canada. Massey was on stage as a teenager and made her film debut in 1958. In 1960, she played a potential murder victim in Michael Powell's cult thriller Peeping Tom. She played the role of the cockney barmaid Babs in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972). She appeared with her brother Daniel playing deadly siblings in the 1973 horror film The Vault of Horror. Massey continued to make occasional film and stage appearances, but has worked more frequently in television, in dramas such as The Pallisers (1974), the 1978 adaptation of Rebecca (in which she starred along with her ex-husband, Jeremy Brett), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978), The Cherry Orchard (1980), and Anna Karenina (1985). She had roles in the British sitcoms The Darling Buds of May (1991) and The Robinsons (2005). She has also appeared in a number of mysteries and thrillers on British television, including episodes of Inspector Morse, The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries, Midsomer Murders, Strange, and Lewis. She is the narrator of This Sceptred Isle on BBC Radio. She also played the part of Josephine Daunt in Daunt and Dervish on BBC radio. In 1986, Massey was awarded the British Academy TV Award for Best Actress for her role in Hotel Du Lac. Enjoy and Seed!!

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freightgod (2011-08-14)

thanks, this looks awesome!

r3deem (2014-09-06)

Thanks for sharing... :)