Cold Comfort Farm follows 19-year-old Flora Poste, who, after the death of her parents and discovering her meager inheritance of £100 per year, decides that instead of getting a job (queen), she’ll write to distant relatives in hopes of securing a place to live. This plan lands her at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex after receiving a reply from her cousin Judith, who alludes to Flora’s supposed “rights” to the farm due to some long-ago wrongdoing suffered by her father at the hands of the Starkadder family.

A parody of the rural farm novels popular at the time of its publication, Cold Comfort Farm had me worried that the humor wouldn’t translate well for modern readers—but I was pleasantly surprised to find the opposite. The novel is packed with delightfully inane and eccentric characters, all of whom Flora immediately sets out to reform. The plot is somewhat reminiscent of Emma, with a “woman of society and culture” taking it upon herself to “fix” people, molding them into a neater, more civilized existence. Her greatest challenge? Aunt Ada Doom, who—I believe, but don’t quote me on this—saw something nasty in the woodshed.

Silly, sharp, and brimming with personality, Cold Comfort Farm is a playful and refreshing take on a genre that can often lean serious. A classic.