Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence

Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence

Horner, Avril

Paperback

ArtistsLiterary Figures

Publisher Price: $19.95

ISBN10: 1526184931
ISBN13: 9781526184931
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: Apr 15 2025
Pages: 372
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.77 Width: 5.06 Depth: 7.81
Language: English

A ground-breaking biography of a cult British novelist.

The extraordinary twentieth-century writer Barbara Comyns led a life as captivating as the narratives she spun. This pioneering biography reveals the journey of a woman who experienced hardship and single-motherhood before the age of thirty but went on to publish a sequence of novels unique in the English language.

Comyns turned her hand to many jobs in order to survive, from artist's model to piano restorer. Unpublished letters reveal an occasionally desperate but resourceful and witty woman whose life ranged from enduring poverty when young to mixing with spivs, spies and high society. While working as a housekeeper in her mid-thirties, Comyns began transforming the bleak episodes of her life into compelling fictions streaked with surrealism and deadpan humour. The Vet's Daughter (1959), championed by Graham Greene, brought her fame, although her use of the gothic and macabre divided readers and reviewers.

This biography excavates Comyns's life and reclaims her fiction, providing a timely reassessment of her literary contribution. It sheds new light on a remarkable author who deftly captured the complexities of human life.

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