Book Review: Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence

Miles Leeson reviews Avril Horner, Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence (Manchester University Press, 2024)

The best biographies are years in the making. In 2017 I invited Avril Horner, who at that point was a year or so into the necessary background research into Barbara Comyns’ life, to speak at a conference entitled ‘Undervalued British Women Writers 1930-1960: Influence and Connectivity’ here at the University of Chichester. Avril’s substantive area of expertise was, and indeed still is, the British Gothic and women’s writing so, following on from her acclaimed work on Daphne Du Maurier, Comyn’s strange fictions of domestic gothic and familial strife seems an ideal fit. It was a such a pleasure, then, to see the book published earlier this summer. Avril’s enthusiasm inspired me to read Comyn’s entire back catalogue (no easy task when some were, at that time, out of print – one I had to borrow from the British Library) and, now, to teach The Vet’s Daughter (1959) on my forthcoming ‘Women and Power’ course.

Comyns’ life stretched across the twentieth century. She was born in Warwickshire in 1907, the fourth of six children, into a well-heeled middle-class family. They lived on the banks of the River Avon in a substantial manor house: some of her childhood experiences are fictionalised in Sisters by A River (1947). Although not idyllic – her father was often moody and violent, her mother rather hands-off (perhaps due to her deafness) – her life changed dramatically when her father died when she was 15. The house was sold and Comyns left for London, and to art school. An ill-fated marriage followed to a fellow artist, but her time in the capital allowed her to spend time gathering the experiences she would bring into later novels – Mr Fox (1987), The House of Dolls (1989) – as well as making connections to the British Surrealist movement.

Surrealism pervades so much of her work; the opening lines of Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) being a useful example ‘The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows. The weight of the water had forced the windows open, so the ducks swam in.’ Who wouldn’t want to read on? The mundanity of everyday life is there in her work, as is the highlighting of the post-war London, the fallout from the Blitz, the starkness of class in Britain in the 1950s, and so much else besides. One novel, The Skin Chairs, is unlikely to be republished (although it can be found from Virago second hand) due to the macabre, and racially offensive, chairs in the abandoned manor house from which the novel takes it title.

Her life experiences meant that her writing career began rather late, and she published her first novel, Sister by a River, when she was forty. Failed marriages, children, a raft of different jobs (dog breeder, antique dealer, classic car dealer, piano restorer and many more) as well as her regularly moving house (around forty times in her lifetime!) precluded earlier publication. She had times of poverty, and a variety of relationships that didn’t work out well. But in 1945 she married Richard Comyns-Carr – an MI6 spy – moved to Spain and started writing seriously.

Her work moves across genres; the shifting between the realist, surrealist and fabulist is clear both within and between her novels and her delicate humour is always present. But from 1969 through to the mid-1980s she fell out of fashion and her work was turned down by her publisher. However, support from Virago’s Carmen Callil and the republishing of some of her backlist brought her back to prominence and, thankfully, three more novels appeared before her death in 1992. In the three decades since her death her reputation has rather waned and, until Horner’s wonderful biography, she was relegated to the backlist of out-of-print female novelists, so many of whom are also due for a revival. It’s a pleasure to see that Virago, Daunt Books, and Turnpike Books currently have most of her novels in print. Unlike many writers of her generation – one thinks here of Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Monica Dickens, perhaps even Antonia White – it is very difficult to pin down Comyns to one type of novel. In this she shares something in common with both Sylvia Townsend Warner, a generation earlier, or the novels of Muriel Spark. In any event she is well worth anyone’s time and The Vet’s Daughter is a very good place to start.

Horner’s biography is essential to make sense of not only Comyns’ life, but the times in which she lived. Horner tells us how delighted she was to gain the support of Comyns’ family who provided her complete access to a great tranche of letters and other materials that made the research process both easier, in terms of filling in the biographical gaps, but much harder in deciding what to keep in and what, ultimately to leave out: perhaps there will be more to come. Horner’s previous work on the selected letters of Iris Murdoch, and her work on Du Maurier has certainly helped in the sifting and writing process. It is a marvellous biography, up there in quality with Hermione Lee’s Virgina Woolf which is (to me at least) the gold standard in biography writing and is certainly the best new biography I’ve read this year.

Miles Leeson
University of Chichester

Miles will teach Comyns’ novel The Vet’s Daughter on his new course on Women and Power in mid-20thC Fiction, September-October 2024.

You can purchase a copy of Horner’s biography of Comyns here.

You can listen to Avril discussing her work here.