Let's have a quiz. Can you tell which of the following bits of writing were written in all sincerity - and which are spoofs?

Exhibit A

Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky – shepherdless, futile, imponderable – and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.

It was cold in the Callow – a spinney of silver birches and larches that topped a round hill. A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles.

Only the crudeness of youth was here as yet, and not its triumph – only the sharp calyx-point, the pricking tip of the bud, like spears, and not the paten of the leaf, the chalice of the flower.

Exhibit B

She touched the big, pallid flowers on their petals, then shivered. They seemed to be stretching in the moonlight. She put her hand into one white bin: the gold scarcely showed on her fingers by moonlight. She bent down to look at the binful of yellow pollen; but it only appeared dusky. Then she drank a deep draught of the scent. It almost made her dizzy.

[...]

When she came to herself she was tired for sleep. Languidly she looked about her; the clumps of white phlox seemed like bushes spread with linen; a moth ricochetted over them, and right across the garden. Following it with her eye roused her. A few whiffs of the raw, strong scent of phlox invigorated her. She passed along the path, hesitating at the white rose-bush. It smelled sweet and simple. She touched the white ruffles of the roses. Their fresh scent and cool, soft leaves reminded her of the morning-time and sunshine. She was very fond of them. But she was tired, and wanted to sleep. In the mysterious out-of-doors she felt forlorn.

Exhibit C

Growing with the viscous light that was invading the sky, there came the solemn, tortured-snake voice of the sea, two miles away, falling in sharp folds upon the mirror-expanses of the beach.

Under the ominous bowl of the sky a man was ploughing the sloping field immediately below the farm, where the flints shone bone-sharp and white in the growing light. The ice-cascade of the wind leaped over him as he guided the plough over the flinty runnels. Now and again he called out to his team:

Upidee Travail! Ho there Arsenic! Jug-jug! But for the most part he worked in silence and silent were his team. The light showed no more of his face than a grey expanse of flesh, expressionless as the land he ploughed, from which looked out two sluggish eyes.

Exhibit D

It was a night of sensual passion, in which she was a little startled and almost unwilling: yet pierced again with piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper, more terrible than the thrills of tenderness, but, at the moment, more desirable. Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder.

Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death.

Exhibit E

'And as she dunna like the chaps about here much—'

'I canna think why — good chaps they be, drawing a straight furrow and handy with the sheep —'

Exhibit F

From the stubborn interwoven strata of his subconscious, thought seeped up into his dim conscious; not as an integral part of that consciousness, but more as an impalpable emanation, a crepuscular addition, from the unsleeping life in the restless trees and fields surrounding him. The country for miles, under the blanket of the dark which brought no peace, was in its annual tortured ferment of spring growth; worm jarred with worm and seed with seed. Frond leapt on root and hare on hare. Beetle and finch-fly were not spared. The trout-sperm in the muddy hollow under the Nettle Flitch Weir were agitated, and well they might be. The long screams of the hunting owls tore across the night, scarlet lines on black. In the pauses, every ten minutes, they mated.

Exhibit G

'Dirty beasts!' said Eli, sweeping them back with his stick. 'Not but what that black 'un will bring a good price come Christmas.'

'Dunna clout 'em, Eli!' came John's voice from the threshold. 'I'd liefer they'd come round me than find the pot of gold under the rainbow. They be my friends, as you know well, and they'm not speechless from emptiness of heart. No, sorrowful and loving they be.'

'Meat, that's what they be,' said Eli.

'Deb!' whispered Lily, 'isn't he an old beast? I hate him more every day, and I wish I could get married—that I do!"

*

Amazingly, only C and F were written by Stella Gibbons and intended to raise a laugh. B was taken from DH Lawrence's Sons And Lovers and D from Lady Chatterley's Lover. A came from Mary Webb's Gone To Earth while E and G came from her book The Golden Arrow.

DH Lawrence needs little introduction. Anyone familiar with his ripe prose, daft dialogue and fondness for rutting will recognise his influence on Stella Gibbons. Mary Webb needs more explanation. It was The Golden Arrow, according to legend (and better still, Wikipedia), that first inspired Gibbons to write Cold Comfort Farm. When the Evening Standard serialised the book in 1928, Gibbons was given the job of summarising previous plot points before each new instalment was published. She grew weary of the "large agonised faces" in Mary Webb's book and dreamed up the Starkadders soon after. "I did not believe, that people were any more despairing in Herefordshire than in Camden Town," she later explained.

Poor Mary Webb was ripe for the send-up. As the passages above show, her novels were laden with pathetic fallacies, heightened rural dolour and appalling, patronising attempts at regional accents. Worse still, she was championed by Stanley Baldwin, a Conservative Prime Minister – then as now the last thing you would want associated with any serious literary endeavour. He even wrote a forward addressed from "10 Downing Street" to her final novel, Precious Bane, when it was rereleased in 1928, during a general revival of her strain of English country romanticism.

A fashion, it's safe to say, that has long since passed, not least because Stella Gibbons makes it appear ridiculous. I've tried to read both Gone To Earth and The Golden Arrow this week and have been unable to take either seriously. I'd struggle to read about "feckless clouds" at the best of times, but after a healthy dose of Cold Comfort Farm it becomes impossible. As the illustrations above demonstrate, Gibbons' satire is just too well-aimed.

Which leads to the interesting question of what Gibbons has done for Webb's legacy. Lawrence, of course, is secure. So are plenty of Gibbons' other big influences, such as Thomas Hardy and Emily Brontë. But Webb is a different matter. Like Sherwood Anderson (drowned by Hemingway in The Torrents Of Spring), this writer is best-known today mainly because she has inspired such a famous parody. And as with Sherwood Anderson, it's quite possible that this is unfair. Precious Bane in particular, which Virago re-released in their superb classics series in 1978, sounds like a sincere and passionate book, full of poetry and humanity (as well as over-the-top nature writing).

Perhaps when Cold Comfort Farm is less fresh in my mind I'll be able to come back to Webb and appreciate her properly. In a way, Gibbons has sparked my interest. Parody is often a form of flattery, after all, and Cold Comfort Farm seems affectionate as well as scathing. There was something there that interested and delighted Gibbons, as well as plenty that made her want to laugh. Sadly, we'll never know what Webb made of the book, since she died aged just 47 in 1927, five years before it was published. But what we can say with certainty about Webb's legacy, love or hate her writing, is that she inspired a masterpiece. There are worse things to be responsible for than Cold Comfort Farm.