33 pages • 1 hour read
Stella GibbonsCold Comfort Farm
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1932A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 19-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary
After Seth’s departure, Judith is inconsolable and will not leave her room: “She had veiled each of the two hundred photographs of Seth with a little black crepe curtain. This done, what else did life hold?” (158).
Flora quickly determines that something must be done about the situation. She makes a lunch appointment in London for herself and Judith to meet a psychiatrist friend named Dr. Mudel. Flora promises Dr. Mudel that Judith will be an interesting case.
Chapter 20 Summary
At lunch, the doctor convinces Judith to take a rest cure at his asylum, followed by a tour abroad. He explains to Flora that he will shift Judith’s focus away from Seth to an obsession first with him as her physician and later with old churches. He will eventually send her on a tour of all the cathedrals in Europe. Judith happily agrees to the plan. Now that Reuben is running the farm efficiently, plenty of money is available to fund Judith’s trip.
Back at home, Flora faces a new challenge when Elfine’s prospective mother-in-law suggests the wedding reception take place at Cold Comfort Farm. This suggestion leads Flora to conclude that something must be done about Aunt Ada before the event. She ponders the matter for weeks, constantly rereading the Abbe’s words in hopes of finding inspiration. Finally, the solution comes to her in a flash.
Soon after this realization, Flora tells the family and servants that she will take Aunt Ada’s tray up to her. She arms herself with a copy of Vogue, a brochure from the Hotel Miramar in Paris, and photos of American film star Fannie Ward. She instructs Mrs. Beetle to bring up food at regular intervals but that no one is to enter the room for the next several hours. Nine hours later, Flora emerges and says that everything will be fine. Aunt Ada won’t cause a problem at the reception. In fact, she will present everyone with a lovely surprise. After that intriguing announcement, Flora retires for the night, thoroughly exhausted.
Chapter 21 Summary
Cold Comfort Farm is a beehive of activity in preparation for the upcoming reception. The house receives its first thorough cleaning in a hundred years. On the day of the wedding, the Starkadder clan arrives in church looking well-groomed and happy. Flora observes them: “There they all were. Enjoying themselves. Having a nice time. And having it in an ordinary human manner […] Really, when she thought what they had all been like, only five months ago” (178). Flora congratulates herself on her accomplishment.
Chapter 22 Summary
When the wedding party returns to the farm, Aunt Ada greets them, wearing a leather flying suit. She tells them that a plane will be arriving in half an hour to carry her to Paris and the Hotel Miramar. She attributes the change in her attitude to Flora, who has shown her that there are many good things in life to be enjoyed. Everyone is relieved to see her happy, and they proceed to make merry. Flora presents Elfine with a copy of The Higher Common Sense as a wedding gift.
Later, Flora takes the opportunity to chat privately with Aunt Ada. Flora asks her aunt about the wrong that Amos supposedly had done to her father and her mysterious rights. She only receives a partial answer because of constant interruptions from the other partygoers. Flora never learns what Aunt Ada saw in the woodshed that unnerved her so many years ago as the private plane that will take Aunt Ada to Paris lands in a nearby field. The old lady receives a warm sendoff from the rest of the party. Afterward, Flora receives the family’s thanks and gratitude for all that she has done.
Chapter 23 Summary
Once the party is over, Flora tidies up the place. Realizing that her work at Cold Comfort Farm is done, she telephones her cousin Charles to fly his plane over and pick her up. The two young people declare their love for one another and fly off together to plan their own wedding.
Chapters 19-23 Analysis
The final section of the book represents the triumph of tidiness, both physical and mental, and the power of the future over the past. Judith’s oedipal obsession with her son is perfect fodder for “the talking cure”—the talking cure was a prolonged psychiatric treatment recently made popular by Sigmund Freud and his followers. Most dramatically, Aunt Ada throws off the chains of half-forgotten trauma in exchange for luxury travel. Instead of Miss Havisham, her new model will be the glamorous aging actress Fannie Ward. No longer fixated on the past, Aunt Ada is ready to put on flight leathers and soar into the unknown future, both literally and figuratively. Significantly, continuing the theme of forcing the Starkadders into a newfound internationalism, the novel stresses that both Judith and Ada will tour other countries. Judith will undertake a continental tour of old cathedrals, transforming her unhealthy fixation with Seth into a more socially acceptable hobby—a hobby that makes the past into a site of tourism rather than an inescapable prison. Ada, meanwhile, will live in Paris in the latest of indulgent style like the wealthy retired widow that she is.
Up until this point, Flora’s tidying has been relational, emotional, and psychological; now, Flora’s tidying takes a literal turn as she supervises a thorough cleaning of the farmhouse and property. The cobwebs in the corners of the rooms of the farm are analogous to the cobwebs that have accumulated in the psyches of all the major characters; just as Flora has liberated them from years of mental and emotional clutter, so she is able to free the rooms of accumulated dust and grime. On the day of the wedding, the Starkadders spruce themselves up, go to church, and generally behave like “normal,” or 20th century, people, giving Flora great satisfaction for her role in their transformation.
Once Flora has squared away the entire Starkadder clan, she turns her attention to tidying up her own life, calling her cousin Charles to retrieve her from Cold Comfort Farm. Up until this point, Charles has been a shadowy figure. Flora occasionally calls or writes to him, but she holds him at a distance until her work is done. Marriage to Charles will be a kind of entrapment—some doors open to a young, single woman in the 1930s will be closed to a wife. However, Charles is clearly quite wealthy, which will solve Flora’s financial problems from the novel’s beginning, and his slightly off-kilter entrance by plane heralds a freer, less constrained married life. Flora ends the novel ready to live happily ever after, which is the tidiest of all possible endings.
