Synopses & Reviews
The Winthrop Hopkins Female Academy of Lesser Hoo, Yorkshire, has one goal: to train its students in the feminine arts with an eye toward getting them married off. This year, there are five girls of marriageable age. Theres only one problem: the school is in the middle of nowhere, and there are no men. Set in the same English town as Keeping the Castle, and featuring a few of the same characters, heres the kind of witty tribute to the classic Regency novel that could only come from the pen of Patrice Kindl!
Review
PRAISE AND AWARDS FOR
KEEPING THE CASTLE:
STAR “Altheas tongue-in-cheek commentary . . . and her razorlike quips are abundantly entertaining, but it is the heroines remarkable ingenuity and compassion for loved ones . . . that make her so endearing.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
STAR “Kindl writes with sharp, effervescent, period-specific language that is so spot-on readers may find themselves adopting a British accent. This witty take on classic Regency romances is frothy fun.”—Booklist, starred review
A Kirkus Reviews Book of the Year
A School Library Journal Best Book of theYear
A Booklist Editors Choice
A Texas TAYSHAS and Lone Star Reading List Selection
Synopsis
Stella Gibbons' novel is a wickedly funny portrait of British rural life in the 1930s. Flora, a recently orphaned socialite, moves in with her country relatives, the gloomy Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm.
- A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with French flaps, rough front, and luxurious packaging
- Features an introduction from Lynne Truss and cover illustrations by Roz Chast
About the Author
Stella Dorothea Gibbons, novelist, poet and short-story writer, was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard.
Her first publication was a book of poems The Mountain Beast (1930) and her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) won the Femina Vie Heuruse Prize for 1933. Amongst her other novels are Miss Linsey and Pa (1936), Nightingale Wood (1938), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Beside the Pearly Water (1954). Her Collected Poems appeared in 1950.
In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb, who died in 1959. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.
Lynne Truss is a writer and journalist who started out as a literary editor with a blue pencil and then got sidetracked. The author of three novels and numerous radio comedy dramas, she spent six years as the television critic of The Times of London, followed by four (rather peculiar) years as a sports columnist for the same newspaper. She won Columnist of the Year for her work for Women’s Journal. Lynne Truss also hosted Cutting a Dash, a popular BBC Radio 4 series about punctuation. She now reviews books for the Sunday Times of London and is a familiar voice on BBC Radio 4. She lives in Brighton, England.
Roz Chast is a regular cartoonist for the New Yorker, and her work has also appeared in Redbook, Scientific American, Fast Company, and the Harvard Business Review.