By Stella Gibbons (1932)
Cold Comfort Farm is a weird book. Immediately dated but seemingly timelessly funny, and with turns of phrase that are probably immortal now (“something nasty in the woodshed”), a sophisticated society girl takes out to save her romantically doom-laden rustic family in darkest Sussex.
My initial impressions (whoa, this is modernist, unreliable narrator) were somewhat deflated when it turns out that the protagonist basically telling them to buck up and start wearing fashionable clothes is in fact the unironic solution.
But reliably amusing and well-written.