Episode 50: Barbara Comyns: Stranger than Fiction

Barbara Comyns: Stranger than Fiction

Any mention of Barbara Comyns usually brings an ‘I know the name but I don’t know anything about her’ kind of response. In this quarter’s literary podcast, presenter Rosie Goldsmith and the Slightly Foxed Editors sit down with Barbara’s biographer Avril Horner and Brett Wolstencroft, Manager of Daunt Books, to discover who this fascinating and forgotten novelist really was.

Though Barbara enjoyed success in the later part of her life, and a revival with Virago Books in the 1980s, it’s indicative of how thoroughly she disappeared from view that, as Avril tells us, she had difficulty in placing her wonderful biography, Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence, which was finally published this year.

Barbara was born in 1907 at Bell Court, a Warwickshire manor house on the river Avon, the fourth in a family of six. Superficially it was a comfortable middle-class upbringing, but her father, a Birmingham brewer, was a moody man given to violent fits of temper, and her mother was deaf and remote. After her father’s death when she was 15, Barbara finally escaped to London where she went to art school and in 1931 married another aspiring artist, John Pemberton. The relationship failed, but through her husband Barbara was introduced to other artists of the London Group and to the ideas of the surrealists, which influenced both her own art and her writing.

Avril describes how, when working on her biography, she came across a huge cache of letters from the 1930s owned by Barbara’s granddaughter, some of which ‘made her gasp’, and the story of Barbara’s life in London is indeed often shocking. It’s a tale of almost unimaginable poverty, of tangled affairs with unsuitable men, of a grim experience of childbirth, and countless moves from one bleak rented property to another.

Yet after repeatedly hitting rock bottom Barbara always courageously picked herself up and started again. At various times she survived as a commercial artist, artist’s model, dog breeder, antique dealer, renovator of old pianos and dealer in classic cars. At last in 1945 she made a happy marriage to Richard Comyns-Carr, who worked for MI6 where he was a colleague and friend of Kim Philby.

The couple moved to Spain, and it was then that Barbara started to write novels drawing on her earlier life such as Sisters by a River and Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. She was admired by Graham Greene who became her publisher, and later came other novels of a more gothic and surrealist kind including A Touch of Mistletoe, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead and The Vet’s Daughter. No two of her haunting and disturbing novels are alike for she wrote in a variety of genres. She’s an intriguing novelist, totally original, impossible to pigeonhole and ripe for re-rediscovery.

Show Notes

Books Mentioned

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles mentioned on the podcast and listed below. Please get in touch with the Slightly Foxed office for more information. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: minutes; seconds)

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Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1:32)

Avril Horner, Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence (1:39)

Dorothy Whipple, The Other Day (4:50)

Barbara Comyns, The Vet’s Daughter (9:07)

Barbara Comyns, The Skin Chairs is out of print (9:10)

Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (13:53)

Barbara Comyns, A Touch of Mistletoe (13:55)

Barbara Comyns, The Juniper Tree (36:41)

Barbara Comyns, The House of Dolls (42:20)

Elspeth Barker, O Caledonia (50:42)

Elspeth Barker, Notes from the Henhouse (52:43)