The James Logan Courier

McClatchy-Tribune News Service (MCT)

The following editorial appeared in the Kansas City Star on Wednesday, Dec. 12:

Starting in 1991, the teenage birth rate declined steadily for a decade and a half, showing that young people were getting the message to avoid parenthood before they were ready for it.

Yet a federal report released last summer said that sexual activity among high school students is no longer declining. After dropping in the 1990s, the numbers of young people who said they had engaged in intercourse leveled off between 2001 and 2005.

Stella Dorothea Gibbons (5 January 1902—19 December 1989) was an English novelist, journalist, poet and short-story writer.

Her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. A satire and parody of the pessimistic ruralism of Thomas Hardy and his followers, the "loam and lovechild" genre, as some called it, Cold Comfort Farm introduces a self-confident young woman, quite self-consciously modern, pragmatic and optimistic, into the grim, fate-bound world those novelists tended to portray. Gibbons's own family was suburban and middle-class, but in some of its psychological dimensions is said to have been "not dissimilar to the Starkadders" described in that novel.[1]

Read excerpts of Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, free from googlebooks.com