The first thing we learn about Flora Poste, the lively heroine of Schlesinger's Cold Comfort Farm, is her refusal to mourn. The death of her parents causes her little grief, she says when she returns from the funeral in London, because she barely knew them. Flora's no-nonsense approach to life sets the stage for the dispatch with which she will later transform the archaic family unit at the farm of her relatives. Thus, before she even arrives at Cold Comfort Farm, the audience has been given notice that no tears will be shed, at least on Flora's part, over any sacrifices that may be made to bring about the transformation of her ancestral home.

Cold Comfort Farm is a beautiful instance of classic comedy. It proves the endurance of a plot structure that originated in Greek comedy and has survived up through Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde, to Stella Gibbons's novel and Schlesinger's adaptation of it. The list of adherents to this tradition in English literature and film is long, and Schlesinger's film stands out as a nearly perfect expression of it. What makes Cold Comfort Farm so original is the succinctness with which it celebrates what it demolishes— namely, the archaic past— and the sly wit with which it acknowledges how vestiges of the past nonetheless live on in the modern world.

The action of this sort of comedy involves the transition from a society ruled over by a tyrant, who is usually a parent, or held in check by a cruel and irrational law, to a congenial society centered in a younger generation. Stock characters abound— imposters, buffoons, pedants, braggarts and so on— who may be part of either the old or the new society and who are commonly included in the new social order, even if they had tried to block it all along. Everyone is liberated at the end of classic comedy. A festive ritual or celebration announces the establishment of the new “green world,” as Northrop Frye famously phrased it. “[S] omething gets born at the end of comedy,” Frye wrote, pointing to comedy's roots in nature and the spring ritual of Dionysus that is commonly identified as the origin of comic and tragic theater in the ancient world (Frye 1957, 170).