Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel written in the 1930s by Stella Gibbons. It is the story of a 19 year old girl called Flora Poste, who after her parents die goes to live with her farming relatives in Sussex. The Starkadders are a very eccentric family and everyone seems to have a dark secret, a tragedy or a passion that is destroying their lives. Flora, who is very practical, decides to 'tidy up' the lives of her strange cousins and even her mad aunt Ada. In the end she manages to transform them all (even the mad aunt) into happy, 'normal' people.
The book is in many ways a parody of the kind of wild, earthy novels that were being written at the time, often about country people leading intense lives. The most famous example of these is probably the author Mary Webb, though the novel also pokes fun at the style of earlier writers like DH Lawrence.