Not only did it give the English language the phrase 'something nasty in the woodshed', but it also redefined a new sort of comedy, the influence of which can, it could well be argued, be traced all the way to modern spoof culture, in movies such as, say, Withnail & I or even Hot Fuzz.īefore Orwell, there was Huxley. She moves in with her rustically eccentric relatives in Sussex, each of whom is afflicted by some pathological emotional problem. Set in an unspecified 'near future', some time after 'the Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of 1946', the book charts the adventures of recently orphaned Flora Poste. It was a brutally funny spoof – one of the first of its kind – of the rural 'loam and lovechild' novels by the likes of DH Lawrence and Mary Webb and, earlier Thomas Hardy.
'I was enraged to see they gave the £40 to Gibbons,' Woolf wrote to a friend upon hearing the news.
Everyone, that is, except Virginia Woolf. When Cold Comfort Farm won the prestigious Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1933, everyone was pleased. In fact, after she drowned herself a decade later, her husband engraved the book's final words on a plaque where he scattered her ashes: 'Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! The waves broke on the shore.'Ĭold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932) Each voice, ultimately, is an attempt to define who they are.Ĭonsidered by many to be Woolf's masterpiece, it was also one of her most personal projects, soaked through with her obsession with water and the sea. The Waves starts with each of them as children, and follows their lives through their innermost thoughts and feelings – the loves, the losses, the failures and triumphs. Blurring the line between prose and poetry, Woolf stitches together a patchwork of soliloquies spoken by the book's six characters, each of whom are believed to have been based on Woolf's own friends and family. It might not even be a novel nobody's really sure – Woolf herself called it a 'play-poem'.
The Waves, considered to be Woolf's most experimental work, artfully evades genre.
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