Flora, being a level-headed, urban woman in the dandy tradition,[3] determines that she must apply modern common sense to their problems and help them adapt to the 20th century – bringing metropolitan values into the sticks.

[4] As parody of the "loam and lovechild" genre, Cold Comfort Farm alludes specifically to a number of novels both in the past and contemporarily in vogue when Gibbons was writing.

"[6] The speech of the Sussex characters is a parody of rural dialects (in particular Sussex and West Country accents – another parody of novelists who use phonics to portray various accents and dialects) and is sprinkled with fake but authentic-sounding local vocabulary such as mollocking (Seth's favourite activity, undefined but invariably resulting in the pregnancy of a local maid), sukebind (a weed whose flowering in the Spring symbolises the quickening of sexual urges in man and beast; the word is presumably formed by analogy to 'woodbine' (honeysuckle) and bindweed) and clettering (an impractical method used by Adam for washing dishes, which involves scraping them with a dry twig or clettering stick).

[10][11] The upper-middle-class teenager Lucia turns from writing charming rural poems to a great Urban Proletarian Novel: "… all about people who aren't married going to bed in a Manchester slum and talking about the Means Test."

To anyone who, like herself, had always lived in the country, the whole thing was too ridiculous and impossible for words.Elizabeth Janeway responded to the lush ruralism of Laurie Lee's memoir Cider with Rosie by suggesting an astringent counterblast might be found by "looking for an old copy of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm".

[12] In order of appearance: In London: In Howling village Sussex: Animals at Cold Comfort Farm: Although the book was published in 1932, the setting is an unspecified near future, shortly after the "Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of 1946".