Only a month? Who am I kidding? I spend exorbitant amounts of (literary) time in England, with occasional forays into Scotland, Ireland, and even Wales. An actual trip to these storied places may be in my future, but for now, I explore towns, lochs, and bogs through the pages of books. December 2025 saw me through five novels set somewhere in the lands of the Bard and the faeries: Measure for Measure is set in Vienna, but penned by Shakespeare; The Book of Dragons comes from the imaginative English socialist E. Nesbit; and Cold Comfort Farm, An Unsuitable Attachment, and Miss Buncle’s Book all take place in the English countryside (or the outskirts of London). My attention was primarily captured by these last three books, all published in the 20th century, all by female British authors, and all wonderfully amusing.
Why I thought Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm was an Advent book I’m still unsure, but such was my initial impression when I reserved it at the library. It is decidedly not an Advent novel in even the remotest way and is instead set in the late winter, spring, and summer of, supposedly, 1946. The publication date is 1932, but for some reason, Gibbons set her book in the nearish future. This is a uniformly strange book, both terribly odd and dreadfully niche. It is straight-up satire, its whole goal being to lampoon the English rural novel genre popular in Gibbons’s day, and it accomplishes this handily. While it’s not a well-known book today, some people may recognize the title from a 1995 movie of the same name, staring Kate Beckinsale, Ian McKellan, Steven Fry, and other notables. I was pleased to discover that Rupert Penry-Jones (Captain Wentworth in my preferred version of Persuasion) also played a role in this film. This isn’t an easily described book — one can only read it and hope for the best. But if you’re in the right mood — and have already imbibed large quantities of English authors in the course of your life — this might be your next right read. To get you in said mood, here’s a quote that still has me giggling (this is a thought of the main character, Flora Poste, after she meets someone she dislikes, and that person quotes one of her favorite authors to her):
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