Finding herself suddenly orphaned, the expensively educated Flora Poste heads for the country to seek her "rights" and refuge with her cousins--the Starkadders--at Cold Comfort Farm. Worlds apart from the 1930s sophistication of Flora's London life, the Starkadders appear like characters from a Thomas Hardy novel. Cousin Judith is burdened with unspecified grief, her son Seth ripples with virility, Amos longs to preach hellfire to the people, and Elfine wants to be a pre-Raphaelite. But above them all looms Great Aunt Ada Doom, who holds the family in her iron grip and who claims to have seen something "nasty" in the woodshed when she was very young.