4 ideas
Aunt Ada Doom saw 'something nasty in the woodshed' as a small child. For decades she used that vague trauma to stay in her room and keep the whole Starkadder family bound to the farm, because no one could leave without supposedly driving her mad. Flora breaks the hold by giving her a practical alternative, fashion magazines and the idea of a comfortable life, and Ada ends the novel flying off to Paris.
Many problems that present as fate, curse, or dark passion persist because nobody tries a mundane practical fix. Flora solves each Starkadder's 'doom' with something ordinary: a Hollywood contact for the smouldering Seth, a proper dress and a match for the fey Elfine, and a Ford van for Amos's preaching. Once the prosaic need underneath the drama is met, the drama evaporates.
The book treats gloom, brooding, and talk of inherited curses as a genre the characters perform rather than a truth about their condition. Seeing suffering this way shows how people choose and maintain a tragic self-story, like the Starkadders' claim that there 'have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort'. Seen as a habit, it becomes something that can be changed.
Gibbons marks her most overwritten descriptive passages with one to three asterisks, like a guidebook's star ratings. This exposes the lush, portentous prose of the rural-novel genre as a technique the reader can see and rate. Labelling the rhetoric explicitly defuses its emotional manipulation.