Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence
by Avril Horner.
Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 361 pp., £30.00
In 1978, at the age of seventy, Barbara Comyns jotted down a new idea for a novel:
I’ve an idea for a book—“Waiting.” Elderly people retiring to a new little house on a garden estate waiting to die but things keep happening. They feel even more intensely than when they were young. Some good things happen, some exciting and some almost horrifying.
A year later she sent the manuscript, which sounds a bit like Beckett’s End-game, to her agent. Publishers said they liked it, but no one took it on; they didn’t think it would sell. Comyns protested: “There may be a revival of interest in my books in the not so distant future. Remember Barbara Pym!” And she was right. By the 1980s she was one of Virago’s celebrated writers (she died in 1992), after the new feminist press discovered and reissued her gothic-tinged novel The Vet’s Daughter (1959).
Other reprints and previously unpublished novels of hers appeared to acclaim in that decade without quite pushing Comyns into the canon of twentieth-century British literature. (The attention also failed to help Waiting, which never did get published.) Now, more than three decades after Comyns’s death and following fresh revivals of her books in the twenty-first century, the British scholar Avril Horner has written a biography. As an indication of how obscure even basic facts about Comyns’s life have become, the capsule biography on almost all the recent reissues puts her birthdate at 1909 rather than 1907. (She kept it a secret all her life.)
Despite these upwellings of popularity over the years, the sui generis quality of her writing makes it seem liable to slide again into oblivion, requiring yet another rediscovery. But this is one of the pleasures of reading Comyns, the feeling that you’re unearthing something akin to outsider art. Although it’s not outsider art—she didn’t have much formal education, but she was well read and even wrote a book about Leigh Hunt (now lost) that Graham Greene tried to get published—her work has a disorienting vitality to it, as if it gave birth to itself without bothering to look around for parents.
Starting at the age of forty, Comyns published eleven short novels. Only five of them are strongly autobiographical, but she leaned on aspects of her life in all her work. The best known are (1950), about a young mother and (1954), about a Warwickshire village during the outbreak of a mysterious plague in 1911; , about a teenager with a villainous father in Edwardian London who under extreme stress becomes able to levitate; and (1985), a Grimm-infused tale of a single mother with a biracial daughter who accidentally (in her telling) kills her spoiled, rich stepson.