Barbara Comyns (1907–1992)
Author of Our Spoons Came from Woolworths
About the Author
Works by Barbara Comyns
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Comyns, Barbara
- Legal name
- Comyns Carr, Barbara Irene Veronica
- Other names
- Bayley, Barbara Irene Veronica (birth)
- Birthdate
- 1907-12-27
- Date of death
- 1992-07-14
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Heatherley School of Fine Art
- Occupations
- novelist
antique furniture dealer
old car dealer
poodle breeder
artist - Relationships
- Pemberton, John (1st husband)
Carr, Richard Comyns (2nd husband) - Short biography
- Barbara Comyns was the pen name of Barbara Comyns Carr, née Barbara Irene Veronica Bayley, born 27 December 1907 at the family estate of Bell Court, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, the fourth among six children (five girls and one boy) of a Birmingham brewer and industrialist. She was educated by governesses and began to write and illustrate stories by age 10. Following the death of her father, she went to London to attend the Heatherley School of Fine Art. In 1931, she married John Pemberton, a painter, with whom she had two children. The couple moved in artistic and literary circles that included Augustus John and Dylan Thomas. After a divorce, she supported herself and her children by various jobs such as trading antiques and classic cars, modeling, breeding dogs, renovating apartments, and working as a cook in a private house. Some of these activities were featured in her 1987 novel, Mr. Fox. In 1945, she remarried to Richard Comyns Carr, who worked in the Foreign Office. Barbara's first published book was the semi-autobiographical novel Sisters by the River (1947), based on her childhood. Her next novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950), was based on her first marriage. Others among her 11 novels were Who was Changed and Who was Dead (1955), The Vet’s Daughter (1959), The Skin Chairs (1962), and The Juniper Tree (1985). Out of the Blue into the Red (1960) was a nonfiction book about Spain, where she and Comyns Carr lived for 18 years. The Vet's Daughter was adapted by BBC radio and also became a 1978 musical called The Clapham Wonder.
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, England, UK
Twickenham, Middlesex, England, UK
Ibiza, Spain
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
San Roque, Andalusia, Spain
London, England, UK - Place of death
- Stanton upon Hine Heath, Shropshire, England, UK
- Burial location
- St Andrew's Churchyard, Stanton upon Hine Heath, Shropshire, England, UK
- Map Location
- England, UK
Members
Discussions
I've never read *******; where should I start? in Virago Modern Classics (January 2014)
Reviews
Comyns’ The juniper tree is a novel based loosely on the Grimm fairy tale of the same name. The main character, Bella, is a single mother to a mixed-race daughter. She finds a new job running an antiques boutique and becomes friends with a nearby wealthy family whose husband decides she needs an education in literature, art, and theatre; the wife, Gertrude, becomes a close friend. Their mansion’s garden becomes a park that Bella and her daughter frequent. Then there’s her mother, who show more is a severe narcissist, though Bella is rather good at enforcing No Contact -- the mother doesn’t even know about Bella’s daughter.
As the book develops, the story flows along nicely, avoiding major speed bumps. Gradually, though, a few details start feeling slightly off: there’s thieving magpies in the garden; the narcissist mother turns up for semi-regular visits and turns out to be horribly racist as well; her ex-boyfriend wants to impress her with his new conquest. Pushing in from beyond Bella’s new idyllic life are ominous reminders that the Outside World is cruel and self-serving, though they remain under the surface; their pressure is subtle.
It was nice to read a book centring onthe stepmother character , and a sympathetic portrayal at that. Other than that this book was just plain well done. It was a gentle, languid read, and, like a fairytale, feels largely untethered to the decade in which it is actually set (the 1980s) -- large sections of the book could have been set in pre-War London, too, or even the 1800s. If I have any point of criticism it is that the events in the plot were kept a little too much in the middle distance -- again, like in a fairy tale: sometimes it feels more like we’re being told about a series of events rather than seeing them happen through the main character, particularly as the story nears its conclusion.
But on the whole this book was a quiet, understatedly nasty read. Not quite character-driven enough, but the buildup and the gentle flavour of the narrative more than make up for that. show less
As the book develops, the story flows along nicely, avoiding major speed bumps. Gradually, though, a few details start feeling slightly off: there’s thieving magpies in the garden; the narcissist mother turns up for semi-regular visits and turns out to be horribly racist as well; her ex-boyfriend wants to impress her with his new conquest. Pushing in from beyond Bella’s new idyllic life are ominous reminders that the Outside World is cruel and self-serving, though they remain under the surface; their pressure is subtle.
It was nice to read a book centring on
But on the whole this book was a quiet, understatedly nasty read. Not quite character-driven enough, but the buildup and the gentle flavour of the narrative more than make up for that. show less
"The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows."
What an opening line! And sets the tone perfectly for Comyns' quirky tale, at turns poetic, horrific, and bucolic.
The short novel takes place in 1914 in a small village in Warwickshire, along one of the many rivers in the county. The story opens after a fierce rain storm has flooded the banks, and indeed has flooded the ground floor of the Willoweed estate. The small group of family and servants are surveying the damage to the home and 4 acre show more grounds, complete with paddling ducks, dead floating peacocks, chickens who gave up the will to live, and other various critters with various fates. One gets the impression the Willoweeds and the village are not terribly perturbed: this simply is life on a river.
The first half of the book we learn about the daily lives of dysfunctional Willoweeds, their few servants, and some of the villagers. The commander in chief is Grandmother Willoweed with her lizard like eyes and ear trumpet, who is either eating, or shrilly complaining, or throwing things. There is also her son, a widower who does not want to get mussed, has fear of real work, and a spends a lot of his time avoiding his mother. With them live also his three children, Emma, Hattie, and little Dennis.
The second half of the book is a turning point from frivolity and humor when villagers begin getting sick, going mad, and often dying. It is alarming and atrocious.
Is this Comyns' style? I can't say; this is the first of her work I've read. I found her to be a writer of prose that is one effortless sentence following another in perfect ease and rhythm. The story is replete with small village characters, each with their quirks, their woes, and each with their unique way of not confronting Grandmother Willoweed.
Here is Old Ives, the gardener,
"Ives liked to choose suitable flowers for his [funerary] wreaths. He often planned the one he would make for Grandmother Willoweed:--thistles and hogswart and grey-green holly--sometimes he would grant her one yellow dandelion."
A delightful half whimsical-half tragic read!
Sit back in the boat, and let Comyns leisurely paddle, pointing out the oddities--sometimes shocking ones--along the shore. You will arrive safe and sound. Just a little ruffled. show less
What an opening line! And sets the tone perfectly for Comyns' quirky tale, at turns poetic, horrific, and bucolic.
The short novel takes place in 1914 in a small village in Warwickshire, along one of the many rivers in the county. The story opens after a fierce rain storm has flooded the banks, and indeed has flooded the ground floor of the Willoweed estate. The small group of family and servants are surveying the damage to the home and 4 acre show more grounds, complete with paddling ducks, dead floating peacocks, chickens who gave up the will to live, and other various critters with various fates. One gets the impression the Willoweeds and the village are not terribly perturbed: this simply is life on a river.
The first half of the book we learn about the daily lives of dysfunctional Willoweeds, their few servants, and some of the villagers. The commander in chief is Grandmother Willoweed with her lizard like eyes and ear trumpet, who is either eating, or shrilly complaining, or throwing things. There is also her son, a widower who does not want to get mussed, has fear of real work, and a spends a lot of his time avoiding his mother. With them live also his three children, Emma, Hattie, and little Dennis.
The second half of the book is a turning point from frivolity and humor when villagers begin getting sick, going mad, and often dying. It is alarming and atrocious.
Is this Comyns' style? I can't say; this is the first of her work I've read. I found her to be a writer of prose that is one effortless sentence following another in perfect ease and rhythm. The story is replete with small village characters, each with their quirks, their woes, and each with their unique way of not confronting Grandmother Willoweed.
Here is Old Ives, the gardener,
"Ives liked to choose suitable flowers for his [funerary] wreaths. He often planned the one he would make for Grandmother Willoweed:--thistles and hogswart and grey-green holly--sometimes he would grant her one yellow dandelion."
A delightful half whimsical-half tragic read!
Sit back in the boat, and let Comyns leisurely paddle, pointing out the oddities--sometimes shocking ones--along the shore. You will arrive safe and sound. Just a little ruffled. show less
Another weird and wonderful novel by the weird and wonderful Barbara Comyns. Hilarity, squalor, love and loss.
I think Comyns has one of most genuinely strange ways of seeing of any writer I know. And somehow the very strangeness of her seeing marks her, and her writing, out as incredibly authentic. Even when things are at their worst — when she's an indentured skivvy to a horrible backyard dog-breeder in an Amsterdam suburb, bite-wounds going septic, with no money or means of escape, or show more when she ("Vicky" in this thinly-fictionalised autobio) and her sister Blanche are starving in London, boiling spuds over a candle and breaking out in boils — the "drunkenness of things being various", to quote MacNeice, shines through. She eschews analysis, preferring to let "things", and emotions, speak for themselves. It doesn't matter why she feels a certain way; what's important is the nature of what she feels. It's the same with the world — she writes like a painter, obsessively looking and showing with prose full of brightness, contrast, and something unexpected on every page.
She's like Stevie Smith running a three-legged race with a Mitford.
Everything is off-skew and hobbledehoy. Returning to her flat after a few weeks away she notes that nothing has changed but "the cockroaches had returned, two living and one dead." The title invokes mistletoe's aspect as a clinging, climbing, stifling plant as well as its traditional amatory significance. Vicky marries three times, only once for love, and is never quite able to alter her default state of cloying penury. Men have a tendency to be awful, smothering her with unwanted "sucking kisses" or arbitrarily withholding her inheritance. One is described like this: "he worked at night in a bakery and looked like a piece of mildewed bread and people said he was a gambler." show less
I think Comyns has one of most genuinely strange ways of seeing of any writer I know. And somehow the very strangeness of her seeing marks her, and her writing, out as incredibly authentic. Even when things are at their worst — when she's an indentured skivvy to a horrible backyard dog-breeder in an Amsterdam suburb, bite-wounds going septic, with no money or means of escape, or show more when she ("Vicky" in this thinly-fictionalised autobio) and her sister Blanche are starving in London, boiling spuds over a candle and breaking out in boils — the "drunkenness of things being various", to quote MacNeice, shines through. She eschews analysis, preferring to let "things", and emotions, speak for themselves. It doesn't matter why she feels a certain way; what's important is the nature of what she feels. It's the same with the world — she writes like a painter, obsessively looking and showing with prose full of brightness, contrast, and something unexpected on every page.
She's like Stevie Smith running a three-legged race with a Mitford.
Everything is off-skew and hobbledehoy. Returning to her flat after a few weeks away she notes that nothing has changed but "the cockroaches had returned, two living and one dead." The title invokes mistletoe's aspect as a clinging, climbing, stifling plant as well as its traditional amatory significance. Vicky marries three times, only once for love, and is never quite able to alter her default state of cloying penury. Men have a tendency to be awful, smothering her with unwanted "sucking kisses" or arbitrarily withholding her inheritance. One is described like this: "he worked at night in a bakery and looked like a piece of mildewed bread and people said he was a gambler." show less
Humour and horror juxtapose'
By sally tarbox on 18 Dec. 2011
Format: Paperback
Lovely book, that can only be described as the literary form of naive art! Comyns recounts episodes from her childhood, brought up in a genteel if debt-laden family. It put me in mind of Nancy Mitford's account of her own family. Irascible Daddy, vague, deaf Mammy, and six children who for want of outside company spend much time together.
Comyns writes in a unique child-like style, with eccentric spelling and an show more antipathy to semi-colons, so that phrases run into each other:
'Mammy had always looked and been rather vague, she had a kind of gypsoflia mind, all little bits and pieces held together by whisps' (sic)
Far from being a sentimental account, Comyns recalls the horrific alongside the magical- villagers drowning in the floods; her father's violence; ill-treatment of animals.
I LOVE Comyns' work ! show less
By sally tarbox on 18 Dec. 2011
Format: Paperback
Lovely book, that can only be described as the literary form of naive art! Comyns recounts episodes from her childhood, brought up in a genteel if debt-laden family. It put me in mind of Nancy Mitford's account of her own family. Irascible Daddy, vague, deaf Mammy, and six children who for want of outside company spend much time together.
Comyns writes in a unique child-like style, with eccentric spelling and an show more antipathy to semi-colons, so that phrases run into each other:
'Mammy had always looked and been rather vague, she had a kind of gypsoflia mind, all little bits and pieces held together by whisps' (sic)
Far from being a sentimental account, Comyns recalls the horrific alongside the magical- villagers drowning in the floods; her father's violence; ill-treatment of animals.
I LOVE Comyns' work ! show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 11
- Members
- 3,454
- Popularity
- #7,359
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 128
- ISBNs
- 76
- Languages
- 4
- Favorited
- 29
