Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence

The power of Barbara Comyns’s novels “derives from a life often lived on the edge,” according to this rewarding biography of the British writer. Horner (Women and the Gothic), an English professor emeritus at Kingston University London, notes that Comyns (1907–1992) was born to affluent parents and enjoyed a tony upbringing. The death of Comyns’s father when she was 18 inaugurated a nearly lifelong struggle with financial hardship and forced her to take a smattering of odd jobs that included housekeeping and modeling for artists. After moving to London in 1929, she adopted a bohemian lifestyle and rubbed shoulders with poet Dylan Thomas and artist Victor Pasmore in the Fitzrovia district’s taverns before trying her own hand at writing. Drawing revealing parallels between Comyns’s fiction and her life, Horner points out that the 1950 novel Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, which follows an artist’s wife who has a child by another man, tracks Comyns’s own romantic entanglements closely enough to be called autofiction. Horner weaves a satisfying late-in-life success story from the flurry of attention Comyns received in the years before her death in 1992, and makes a strong case that her “life was as extraordinary as her novels.” This should earn Comyns some new fans. Photos. (Mar.)