Comyns’s parents-a deaf and disinterested mother and a violent, alcoholic father-were too consumed with their own sparring to pay their children much attention. As a child, she and her siblings had been left to run wild in the hands of inattentive governesses. Tantalizing tidbits were scattered both in the various introductions that had been written by her admirers and friends over the years and in the novels themselves, since Comyns often fictionalized her own life. I also began learning what I could about Comyns’s life, keen as I was to find out as much as possible about the woman behind these weird and wonderful books. by Dorothy, a publishing project, in 2010, and The Juniper Tree (1985), which appeared as a Capuchin Classic in the UK the following year. I wrote a short rave review of the 2013 Virago editions for the Observer, and then I began tracking down copies of Comyns’s eight other works, only two of which were then also in print: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954), which had been reissued in the U.S. Angela Carter is the only writer who comes close, but Comyns’s work has none of the same feminist underpinning.
With her way of combining elements of social realism, replete with Dickensian touches, with all manner of macabre gothic tropes dark enough to have been taken out of the original Grimm’s fairy tales, Comyns was quite unlike anyone I’d ever read.
Eight years ago, Virago reissued three of the midcentury British writer’s novels- Sisters by a River (1947), Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950), and The Vet’s Daughter (1959)-on their Modern Classics list, and I was immediately and utterly smitten by her singular voice. When I’m asked how I first became interested in out-of-print and forgotten books, my answer is always the same: it all began with Barbara Comyns.
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