While Jane Austen provides a model for Gibbons to the extent that Flora puts things to rights in the manner of Fanny Price (of Mansfield Park, which is the source of the novel’s epigraph) Emily’s Wuthering Heights is both satirised (especially in the character of Adam) and used as evidence of the pressures on women writers because of Mr Mybug’s contention that ‘No woman could have written that. Furthermore, it specifically refers to both Jane Austen and Emily Brontë, who, according to Woolf, were the only the two women writers to have written ‘as women write, not as men write’ (Woolf 2000: 68). For example, it has conversations between women characters that don’t revolve around men. Certainly, Cold Comfort Farm carries some of the markers that Woolf refers to.

One way of thinking about this near-future setting would be to consider Cold Comfort Farm as a work sitting on that line of development imagined by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own as stretching forward a hundred years from Life’s Adventure by Mary Carmichael (a fictional version of Marie Stopes’s Love’s Creation – A Novel ) to a point when a genuine women’s writing will be the norm. (Compare Woolf in The Years : ‘One of these days d’you think we’ll be able to see things at the end of the telephone?’ ). One character (Claud) has participated in the Anglo-Nicaraguan Wars of 1946 (Gibbons 2006: 160) and there is a telephone conversation in which Flora is visible to Claud via the ‘television dial’ at his home (Flora is in a public phone box and so doesn’t have the option of seeing the other end of the line see Gibbons 2006: 128). Cold Comfort Farm is set maybe 15-20 years after its date of publication (1932).

Stella gibbons