Why Barbara Comyns is the best English novelist you’ve never heard of
The novels of Barbara Comyns draw you in from their strange, beguiling first sentences. Take 1954’s Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, for example, which begins: “The ducks swam through the windows.” Or 1950’s Our Spoons Came From Woolworths: “I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.” Her wartime dispatch Mr Fox, written in the 1940s but published in 1987, starts: “The other people in the house where I lived didn’t like me. I expect it was because I was living with a man I wasn’t married to.” And The Vet’s Daughter (1959), her very best novel, begins: “A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and spoke to me when I was thinking of something else.” I mean, come on. Don’t you just want to read them all right now?
Before that, though, you might be thinking: but… I don’t have the faintest idea who Barbara Comyns Writing at the same time as the likes of, , , and , she is one of the most thrillingly unique mid-century English
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