Cold Comfort Farm

Aunt Ada is a recluse in her seventies. Her entire life is dominated by a dark memory from her childhood. Claiming that she saw something nasty in the woodshed when she was two years old, Aunt Ada uses this trauma as an excuse to withdraw from the world. For the most part, she lives in an upstairs room on the farm and controls the other members of her family with tradition and fear.

The other Starkadders fear Aunt Ada, both because she holds the family purse strings and because she stages histrionic fits whenever it suits her purposes. Aunt Ada believes that keeping her family close is the best way to protect all of them from the horrible outer world and the dangers of the future. Flora is able to convince Aunt Ada that she is missing out on most of life’s pleasures by doing so, eventually persuading Aunt Ada to leave the attic and fly off to Paris to stay at a luxury hotel and savor the good things in life.

Seth is the handsome younger son of Judith and Amos Starkadder. He is the favorite of both his mother and his grandmother: “He looked exactly what he was, the local sexually successful bounder” (149). Seth is not a man of action, and he enjoys a sedate life of simply existing as an object of his mother and grandmother’s adoration.

Judith’s unnatural attachment to her son is evidenced by the two hundred photographs of him that make up her shrine to him in her room. Ada is equally enamored. Judith and Aunt Ada’s adoration lead Seth to see himself as being devoured by women, so he becomes a womanizer to devour them first whenever possible. While he passively accepts the attentions of his female relatives, Seth’s real passion in life is film. When he is offered a movie contract, he eagerly accepts, choosing to escape the static one-dimensional life of the farm for the animated existence of a film star. Seth’s departure from Cold Comfort Farm ruptures the status quo and allows for real growth within the Starkadder family.

Like Seth, Elfine is a passive agent of change for her family. She is the youngest of the Starkadder children. At 17, she is strikingly beautiful but her habit of roaming around the countryside at odd hours characterizes her as an eccentric. Flora decides to take Elfine in hand in order to undo the eccentric influence of her family. With Flora’s help, Elfine learns how to behave like a sophisticated young lady.

Elfine’s sole ambition in life is to marry the local squire, Richard Hawk-Monitor, and she achieves this goal with Flora’s help. Elfine creates another crack in the family’s foundation of traditions when she becomes engaged and disrupts Aunt Ada’s plan to marry Elfine to cousin Urk. The book’s pivotal scene occurs when Flora announces the engagement to the entire family. Conversely, Elfine’s wedding celebration is the scene that depicts a resolution of the family’s ills and sets them on a better path for the future.

Judith is the middle-aged mother of the three Starkadder children. She is morose and gloomy at the beginning of the story but is determined to right the unspoken wrong done to Robert Poste’s child, Flora. Judith’s unnatural passion for Seth is the cornerstone of her existence. When he leaves, she wallows in a state of misery until Flora arranges for her to see a psychiatrist who substitutes a more harmless obsession in Seth’s place.

Amos is the eldest male family member, and he runs the farm on behalf of Aunt Ada. He is far less concerned with agriculture than with salvation, and he constantly preaches fire and brimstone sermons to his family. When Flora identifies Amos’s frustrated longing to spread the gospel, she steers him toward a new vocation. When Amos happily departs on a speaking tour around the country, he leaves the farm in Reuben’s hands.

Reuben is the eldest child of Amos and Judith. He is far less complicated than the rest of his family since his only concern is to inherit Cold Comfort Farm from his father. Initially, he dislikes Flora because he views her as a competitor for the farmstead. Eventually, he recognizes her as an ally when she rids the farm of Amos. When Reuben takes the reins, he manages the property much more efficiently than his father did.