191. Barbara Comyns — Our Spoons Came From Woolworths and The Vet’s Daughter with Avril Horner

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to preserving the legacies of forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my cohost, Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: While preparing to discuss this week's lost lady, the British novelist, Barbara Comyns, I found myself feeling fascinated but also mildly unsettled at the same time. Does that register at all with you, Kim?

 KIM: Well, yes, um, I'm thinking about two of her novels, which we're focusing on for this episode: Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and The Vet's Daughter. I think fascinating slash unnerving can apply to them both. Almost all of Barbara Comyns’s books feature vulnerable young women enduring traumatic ordeals, be it crushing poverty, abandonment, or abuse. Yet wit and woe sit side by side in her books, which were published between 1947 and 1989. They're dark, yes, but at the same time, there's also something almost effervescent about them.

AMY: Yeah, there's a remarkable quality about them where imaginative power and humor seem to effortlessly emerge, almost as if they're capable of levitating from within, sort of catching you by surprise.

KIM: Levitate. Now that's a term we'll be returning to later on in this episode. But let's start things off with our feet firmly on the ground, because there's a lot to discuss in the life of Barbara Comyns, who counted surrealists, spies, and a one-time romantic rival among her close friends.

AMY: Her life was not without its complications, messiness, and yes, stress, but with a sort of naïve pluck she powered through. As she once wrote in her novel, Mr. Fox, “In the back of my mind I was always sure that wonderful things were waiting for me, but I'd got to get through a lot of horrors first.”

KIM: And that line is actually an epigraph from a terrific new biography on Barbara Comyns by Avril Horner, who's joining us today for this discussion. So let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Avril Horner, is an emeritus professor of English at Kingston University in Southwest London. With a particular interest in women writers and Gothic fiction, Avril has coauthored and or edited numerous books, including Women and the Gothic, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, and Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire, and the Older Woman.

AMY: Avril's most recent book is Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence, published in March by Manchester University Press. British news outlet The Independent included this book in its list of the best nonfiction books to read in 2024 — amazing — and also declared that Avril's book is, quote, “an important intervention, ensuring Barbara Comyns’s name is not forgotten. But it's also a reminder that writers' legacies need careful stewarding and are never guaranteed.”

KIM: Hear, hear! Don't we know it? Avril, welcome to the show and congratulations on this book. It's so great.

AVRIL HORNER: Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here.

AMY: So, Barbara Comyns wrote 11 novels, which were published across five decades. And the reception toward most of her books was initially mixed at best. It seems like sales were often underwhelming, and that's a fact that left Comyns discouraged until much later in her life when her work was given new consideration and began earning high praise.So Avril, when did you first discover Barbara Comyns, and what made you want to write her biography?

AVRIL: About 20 years ago my good friend Sue Zlosnik who worked on the gothic a lot, we were asked to write an essay on female gothic for a special issue of a journal. So we hemmed and hawed and thought about the usual suspects like Mary Shelley and Daphne du Maurier and Angela Carter. And then Sue said, “Ah, why don't we look at Barbara Comyns?” And I had not heard of Barbara Comyns 20 years ago, so I read The Vet's Daughter, and I was completely hooked. Absolutely mesmerized by this book. So we wrote the article, which was published, and then I went on to read everything else and got hold of the stuff that was difficult to get hold of through the British Library. And then I begin to think, you know, what an interesting life she led, how extraordinary that no one's written a biography. But I was very, very busy leading a research team and doing all sorts of things at university, so it had to wait until I retired. And then I decided I really did want to write her biography because I've always thought she's been left out of all those reclamations of women in the 20th century, like Elizabeth Jane Howard and Barbara Pym. She's not been reclaimed in the same way. So I thought, it's time to reclaim her. She is an extraordinary writer. Her work is like nothing else being written at the time. And I just thought, “Right, I'm going to get in there and write the first biography.” So that's what I did!

KIM: I love that it stayed with you over that time period and you came back to it. I think that probably doesn't happen so much. It's meant to be, right?

AVRIL: Yes.

KIM: So I love the subtitle, A Savage Innocence. It's so great. Um, can you talk about that description a little bit with regard to her work?

AVRIL: Yes, okay. It took me a long time to find the right subtitle. I played around with several. And then of course I read this introduction by Ursula Holden to the novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, which was republished by Virago in 1987. And Ursula Holden described her In this way: “Barbara Comyns deftly balances savagery with innocence.” and I thought, that's it! That's what it is, that peculiar mixture of savagery and innocence in her work. There's an extraordinary range of mood and emotions in Barbara Comyns’s novels, but they're often focused through a very innocent young woman, or even a girl in some cases. And the experiences are presented very, very well, directly by this innocent person.  And also these young women who are so innocent and naive do actually harbor sometimes quite savage instincts. In Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, Sophia, the main character, when she sees her lover's wife, she thinks to herself, “I'd like to smash that beastly woman's face to a pulp.” So, behind these innocent women, there are these savage feelings. That peculiar contrast between innocence, naivety, and savage emotion is there in the books. It's also there in the main female characters, I think.

AMY: Yeah, I think it's that paradoxical way that she presents her world. It almost knocks you off balance a little bit reading it. So let's dive into her life a little bit. Barbara Comyns was born Barbara Bailey in 1907 in Bidford-on-Avon. She was one of six children in an upper-middle-class family whose home was Bell Court, a large country house on the River Avon. This all sounds pretty idyllic, but Avril, tell us a little bit more about the realities of her youth and how that would go on to shape her.

AVRIL: Um, it does sound idyllic on the surface. I've been to Bidford-on-Avon a couple of times. It's a beautiful village, and the house itself is really lovely. And it's still there, although it's lost a lot of the out houses. And at the back of the garden, there was the River Avon, so it was an idyllic setting. The children were also always well-dressed and well-fed, and they had lots of freedom in the garden. They played with each other endlessly. There were lots of pets. There were loads of dogs. A peacock that followed her father around. And her mother even had a pet monkey. So, it was an extraordinary household, but — and there are buts — she was never properly educated. The only one sent away to school for any length of time was the boy. So the girls suffered a series of governesses who were not very well-educated themselves. And she didn't have a secure emotional upbringing either, although, you know, materially it seemed very comfortable. Her mother had six children quite quickly and resented being a mother. You get the feeling she would like to have lived a more bohemian life and become an artist, but she didn't. So she tended to sort of send them off to the governesses and never really played with them and didn't really listen to them and was often short-tempered with them. So when Barbara was unhappy as a child, she would be more likely to turn to her sisters or her grandmother for emotional comfort than her own mother. And you can see echoes of that in the fiction, that often the relationships between mothers and daughters are very strained. For example, in The Juniper Tree, her late novel. Also, her father had a terrible temper. He could be very generous and kind, and he took the children out more than the mother did and paid more attention to them, but he had a terrible temper and did occasionally beat his wife and beat the children. He would explode. And that marks her fiction too. In The Vet's Daughter, there's a father who quickly becomes very angry and is a bit of a tyrant. So, um, it wasn't quite as idyllic as it might have seemed on the surface, her childhood.

KIM: So she was 15 when her formal education ended, and then at that point, I guess her father's finances were more precarious and she basically was expected to go off and support herself. She knew she wanted to be an artist, and she worked briefly, I guess, as a kennel maid in Amsterdam, but then she moved to London, enrolled in art school, and she ended up living this classic bohemian lifestyle that her mom may have wished that she had, right, Avril?

AVRIL: Yeah, that's absolutely right. In 1929, she signed up at an art school called Heatherley’s in London, which is a private art school, which still exists. Barbara was very serious about wanting to be an artist. She had in her head she wanted to be a sculptor. Her father had left her a bond which matured, so she could pay for the first two terms, and she loved being there, but the money quickly ran out. She shared a bedsit when she was at Heatherley's with her sister, Chloe. A very, very small apartment, and they didn't have much money between them. Chloe moved out to become a lady's companion, which is what many young middle class women did, and Barbara was left in this flat she couldn't really afford. So she moved to a smaller flat. But in 1930, uh, John Pembrton, who both she and her sister knew vaguely from childhood, he came to London too, and he signed up as an art student. And perhaps because they were both a bit lonely, they became good companions, and then they became lovers. And they moved into a flat in Hampstead before they got married, although they kept their [respective] flats on to preserve respectability until the marriage day. They were very much in love and they enjoyed the bohemian life of London. John's uncle by marriage was a man called Rupert Lee, and he introduced them to all sorts of famous people in Fitzrovia, an area where artists and writers mixed. So they met people like Dylan Thomas, the poet, Paul Nash, who's famous for his woodwork, uh, Nina Hamnett and Victor Pasmore and Augustus John, who was lauded as a great painter. So she enjoyed that milieu for a while, even though they were poor, and in fact it became a badge of honor, you know? If you were a really serious artist, you didn't mind poverty. You embraced it as part of your outward struggle to become an artist. They were very young. John was 21 and Barbara was 23, and they intended to embark on this wonderful life of being artists, but it didn't quite work out that way.

AMY: Right. And so all of this, you know, romantic but sort of miserable poverty coincides with Barbara's highly autobiographical second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, which she wrote actually when she was in her 40s and looking back at this earlier time, and it was published in 1950. The novel begins with 21-year-old Sophia Fairclough marrying an artist. As in the novel, Barbara really did have a pet newt in the pocket of her tweed suit at her wedding, which is such an unforgettable detail of that book.

KIM: I love that. Yeah.

AMY: Also in the novel, Sophia and her husband began their married life very poor, but happy. And I thought, based on the book's title, that this was going to be some sort of cheery, you know, maybe slightly quirky story about domestic life. But it's really not that. Avril, why don't you sketch out some of the ways that Barbara's, and ergo, the fictional Sophia's, life soon falls into chaos.

AVRIL: Well, one of the first things that happens is that Sophia becomes pregnant, much to her husband's horror, just as Barbara became pregnant only a few months after marriage. And in the novel, Sophia thinks to herself, “I had a kind of idea that if you controlled your mind and said, I won't have any babies,’ very hard, they most likely wouldn't come. I thought that was what was meant by birth control. I mean, this always makes me laugh.

AMY: Oh my god.

KIM: That's the naive part right there!

AVRIL: I suspect that that was the case with Barbara, too. Um, in those days, you know, sex education was not a thing, and women often found out by bleak experience how things worked. So Barbara became pregnant a few months after they married. John was horrified because he wanted to be a great artist and didn't really want to be a father. He was only 21 or so. But their son, Julian, was born in March 1932. Now John was so insistent on his own career as an artist that he refused to go out and find work to support his wife and their little boy. He just insisted on painting all the time, hoping for more commissions. But this, if you remember, is the beginning of the Depression: 1932. So people weren't buying paintings, and they got poorer and poorer. So it fell to Barbara, really, to try to make some money. And she managed to get work as an artist model. She remained beautiful all her life, so it wasn't difficult. But she was rapidly becoming disillusioned with John, her husband, because he wasn't helping. And she was frustrated that she was unable to fulfill her own talent and she didn't have time to paint or sculpt because they didn't have money. He took all the money for his paints, and she was out trying to earn some money to feed the three of them. And she became pregnant again in 1934, and they had a discussion, and in fact, she and John borrowed some money and Barbara had an abortion because they felt they simply couldn't afford to feed another small mouth. And that abortion episode goes into a couple of novels, and it was clearly something I think that haunted Barbara. you know. 

AMY: We talk about her innocence, but then weigh that against the fact that she's being the adult in this relationship. She's the breadwinner. She's the one that's saying, I’ve got to abandon my own artistic pursuits and make sure we have food on the table. And that's kind of interesting because she is in some ways like a little girl, and yet she's the one that's holding it all together.

AVRIL: Yes. I think it was a process of rapidly growing up, you know, those first few years of our marriage.

KIM: Yeah. So she does such a great job of portraying that in the novel and giving you a feeling for what that was really like. So when we get to the maternity ward scenes in the novel, (because then Sophia has two children in the novel, a son and a daughter) and the maternity ward scenes are very intense. Avril, would you be willing to read a short passage from the book so listeners can hear some of it?

AVRIL: Yes, of course. Just to contextualize it, Sophia goes into labor and her husband takes her to a hospital, but in those days the husbands were shooed away, you know, once the woman arrived at the door. This is before the National Health Service kicked in in 1948. So she describes in the book how Sophia is whisked away by various people and then taken by a nurse to have a bath. But because she's actually in labor by now, she feels she really can't climb into that bath. So she splashes the water about to make herself wet, to pretend she's had a bath, and then a nurse comes back and works out that she hasn't actually got in the bath and calls her “a dirty, dirty woman.” This is the beginning of lots of horrible scenes. And she's carrying a suitcase all the time, so she's taken off to another room, and the pains keep coming, and it's very difficult to keep still while they're asking her all these questions, and then, of course, she's shaved, and she has disinfectant put on her pubic area which makes her jump with pain but she says in a way it was a relief because it was a different sort of pain from the labor pain. It distracts her for a while. And I'll read from there:

I lay in bed for about an hour and kept shivering. The pain did not seem quite so bad now I wasn't being disturbed all the time. Unfortunately, a maid came with some tea and bread and butter on a tray. I took one look and was sick all over the bed. The nurse in charge of the ward came and looked at me disgustedly and asked why I hadn't asked for a bowl to be sick in. I was taken out of the labour ward and put in another room, all by myself. I carried my horrid case, which appeared every time I was moved, although it disappeared every time I got into bed. Two nurses came and examined me. I heard one say it would be about two hours before the baby came. Two more hours seemed an awful long time. The pains got much worse again, and I tried saying “Lord Marmion” [the poem], but they told me to be quiet. I longed to cry out, but knew they would be angry, so I bit my hands. There are still the scars on them now. My hands seemed to smell of Grapenuts, and I remembered a white dog we used to have when we were children and she kept having puppies all the time — I felt very sorry for her now. They gave me a bowl to be sick in and I managed not to get any on the bed, but without any warning the wicked castor oil [they'd given me] acted and I was completely disgraced. The nurse was so angry. She said I should set a good example and that I had disgusting habits. I just felt a great longing to die and escape, but instead, I walked behind the disgusted nurse, all doubled up with shame and pain. 

Then she's taken to yet another ward. 

Suddenly it changed, and I was on a kind of trolley. The next place I found myself was a brilliantly lighted room, with two doctors and a nurse. As soon as I arrived in the room I could tell they were going to be kind. I was lifted off the trolley on to a very high kind of bed-table arrangement…. I explained to the nurse that I kept being sick all the time, but she didn't seem to mind. Every time I had a great pain she made me pull a twisted sheet that was fixed to the head of the bed in some way, and she would say, “Bear down, Mother.” I tried to explain that I wasn't a mother, but couldn't get it out. In between the pains they asked me questions, so they could fill in even more forms….

There was one dreadful thing — they made me put my legs in kind of slings that must have been attached to the ceiling; besides being very uncomfortable, it made me feel dreadfully shamed and exposed. People wouldn't dream of doing such a thing to an animal. I think the ideal way to have a baby would be in a dark, quiet room, all alone and not hurried. Perhaps your husband would be just outside the door in case you felt lonely… One of the doctors stood by my bed and said he would give me something to put me to sleep in a minute, and the nurse kept urging me to bear down and I could feel everyone trying to hurry me up. Then I was enveloped in a terrific sea of pain and I heard myself shouting out in an awful, snoring kind of voice. Then they gave me something to smell and the pain dimmed a little. The pain started to grow again, but I didn't seem to mind. I suddenly felt so interested in what was happening. The baby was really coming now and there it was between my legs. I could feel it moving, and there was a great tugging in my tummy where it was still attached to me.Then I heard it cry, so I knew it was alive and was able to relax. Perhaps I went to sleep. The next thing I knew was the doctor pressing my tummy, but although it hurt, it didn't seem to matter. 

I asked the nurse what kind of baby it was and if it was perfect. She said, of course it was, but I asked her to make sure it had all its fingers and toes. She laughed, and said it was a lovely little boy, rather small, but quite healthy. 

I couldn't help crying when I heard it was a boy, because I knew there wasn't much chance of Charles liking it, now it was a boy. He particularly disliked little boys. I longed to see the baby, but they said I couldn't yet. It has stopped crying, and I was worried in case it was dead. So I cried about that too.

KIM: Unforgettable.

AVRIL: Yeah. 

AMY: The first time I read it, I felt physically ill. Listening to it again, tears kind of welled up in my eyes again. And I realized things have not changed that much. Because I went through some of those same things, of knowing I was going to get sick and I was holding my baby and there was no one to get me a bowl and, um, I remember at one point, after I had my daughter, like an hour or so after the delivery, my doctor came back into the room and she was the first person that had been kind to me, I would say. And I just started crying and she said, “Why are you crying?” And I said, “Thank you for being nice to me.” Those descriptions of like the rough and hurried nurses, that was very familiar to me. It's a shame that the medical system hasn't changed that much.

AVRIL: Yes, yes. Yes, I remember my second son was taken away immediately. I had just had a C-section and I was out of it. Um, but he was taken away because he was jaundiced, but I didn't see him for about two days. Other people saw him. And I was in a, you know, a knot of anxiety and sadness, you know? The third time around it was much better, but, uh, I think we've all had those experiences and the scars remain. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: And the fact that she is so honest in her depiction, I mean, at the time that must have been unusual.

AVRIL: It was. It was extraordinary for 1950 to write in that way. Such frankness, I don't think I've come across it anywhere else, at that period. Having a child was often sentimentalized in magazines, you know, it was presented as the most fulfilling thing a woman would experience, having a child. The baby was a little treasure, you know, there was none of this stuff about postnatal depression or the difficulty of actually dealing with a little baby when you're deprived to sleep yourself. So, no, there wasn't much that was negative about childbirth or, you know, women becoming mothers at that time at all. And even today I think it's actually quite difficult for women to talk frankly about traumatic experiences in childbirth. They do occasionally, and women do publish things, but there is this, I think, conspiracy. I do it myself. You don't say to a young pregnant woman, “Oh my God, you're going to feel some pain.” You know, you wouldn't, because you wouldn't want anyone to be frightened. So there is a sort of benign conspiracy. But also I think there's a sort of social conspiracy of silence that some of the more difficult aspects of childbirth aren't explored fully.

KIM: I've been saying ever since I had my child that I wish there was a therapist right there, immediately after you gave birth, to talk you through what you've been through. But you're just expected to be thrilled at that moment and there's a lot going on. 

AVRIL: It's very common for me to have very conflicting emotions and be depressed or tearful after childbirth.  

AMY: So Comyns’s depiction of her own childbirth scene is… hard, but wonderfully written. There is some comedy too. I'm thinking about the moment where she thinks that cups of lemonade are being served in the clinic, not realizing it's a urine sample. Um, and then also when she winds up getting pregnant accidentally for the third time, Comyns writes that Sophia thinks, “Why should all these babies pick on me?” I laughed out loud at that moment in the book. So there is humor, but it derives from Sophia's misery, almost. And the writer Maggie O'Farrell describes it as, quote, “the disparity between tone and content,” which we sort of have talked a little bit about already. What do you think makes this formula so successful for her though, Avril? How does she pull this off? 

AVRIL: It’s interesting, isn't it? I think O'Farrell's phrase is absolutely right, that disparity between tone and content. You've got these naive young women, and so you laugh at them when they make these mistakes because it's comical. And we've all been caught out like that ourselves. But behind those young women is this author who's been through a lot herself. You know, she's been through abortions, suicide attempts and all sorts of things. So you have this knowing person behind the young woman. And she doesn't damn the characters who are cruel or insensitive. Or give lectures about them or preach to the reader about how one should behave. A lot of that taking people down a peg is done through humor.

KIM: Definitely. So, in Our Spoons came from Woolworths, Sophia takes a lover. He's a man named Peregrine. His real life equivalent in Barbara's life was an artist and critic named Rupert Lee. But the more fascinating relationship, which we learned about in your biography, is between Barbara and Rupert's other mistress, Diana Brinton. She and Barbara were what we'd say today as frenemies, right?

AVRIL: I think that's a very good term. It didn't occur to me to use that when I was writing the biography, but I think it sums up their very, very complicated relationship very well. Yes, her marriage was falling apart. This husband who wasn't providing anything for her was also having affairs himself. The marriage was falling apart and, uh, she was lonely. In 1934, she was seduced by Rupert Lee, John's uncle by marriage, who was 20 years older than her, and quite eminent in artistic circles in London. By November that year, Diana Brinton, who was Rupert Lee's partner, knew that he was having an affair with Barbara, of whom she was quite fond actually. They'd met socially many times, they had quite a lot in common, similar sense of humor, both liked art, discussing art. Now, Rupert had had several affairs, and Diana Brinton was used to sorting out his messy love life because he never really wanted to marry these women. But he had persuaded Barbara to believe that he would leave Diana for her. In 1935, Barbara became pregnant by Rupert Lee, and later that year in November, she had a little girl whom she called Caroline. For various reasons, she was absolutely sure it was Rupert's child. And Rupert had always said he'd wanted a child. He and Diana had no children. So she thought he would be delighted and that would put the seal on their relationship and he would leave Diana. But like many, many in that situation, Rupert suddenly became very evasive and Barbara fell into despair. She gradually realized that Rupert Lee would never leave Diana. And in 1936, Rupert confessed to Diana that he was the father of Caroline, Barbara's little girl. So by this time, Barbara was very frightened. Her marriage was falling apart. John was hardly around. Rupert wasn't going to support her. She now had two children. So she actually wrote to Diana saying how glad she was that she knew because she'd had to lie about things and it was better that things were in the open. Now, amazingly, Diana Brinton took this all very calmly. She, you know, she'd sorted out several affairs before. And she actually helped Barbara financially, quite a lot. But what she didn't want was Rupert to leave her, nor did she want a scandal to break onto the London art scene where they were very prominent. So in a sense, she bought Barbara off. She set her up as a landlady in a building, and she gave her money, gave her an allowance. So it was a peculiar relationship of helping Barbara, but keeping her within bounds. And she could be very calculating, Diana. She actually got her family doctor to sign a statement saying that Barbara was mentally unstable and would probably stay mentally unstable for the rest of her life. She also, through her lawyer, in exchange for money, got Barbara to give up the love letters Rupert Lee had sent to her, which proved that he was the father. And Diana burnt them, so that in the court of law, Barbara would have no evidence. Also the jury would be presented with this note that she was a mentally unstable woman. Diana was a very sophisticated woman, more sophisticated than Barbara in many ways. And it was a love hate relationship, because they were actually quite fond of each other. There were lots of rows, lots of very tearful scenes, but eventually their relationship settled down and they became friends again. And indeed it was Diana Brinton who introduced Barbara to her second husband, Richard Comyns Carr. If you look at the letters, there was, as well as emotional blackmail (and there's plenty of that between the two women) there was also a genuine affection and respect for each other. So I think frenemies is exactly the right word to conjure up that relationship. I've never come across anything quite like it before.

AMY: No, and so many of her relationships that you write about in the book are fascinating, but this was the one that fascinated me the most, and it is the stuff that truly soap operas are made of, right? And interestingly, Diana is not depicted anywhere in Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. But it was really eye opening for me to read that novel, as well as The Vet’s Daughter, to read those both alongside your biography, Avril. It's almost like having the reference book next to you, which is fun. Um, you know, Speaking of The Vet's Daughter, that one seems like it veers a little bit from her own experiences. It was her most critically acclaimed novel, and we were originally going to focus on Our Spoons Came From Woolworths for this episode and just leave it at that, but you suggested that we give The Vet's Daughter a look, and I'm so glad you did, because I actually liked this book even more than Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. 

KIM: I loved it too. It was great.

AVRIL: I wanted us to look at both novels, because she wrote 11 books and you can divide her fiction into what we would call realism (and I think I would put Our Spoons Came From Woolworths in that sort of realist category, as well as other books like, Sisters by a River and A Touch of Mistletoe.) But there are four of her books that make use of extraordinary effects we might describe as magical realist, or gothic, or uncanny. And those four books are Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, The Vet's Daughter, The Skin Chairs, and The Juniper Tree. So I wanted us to look at both sides of her writing style, because they are very different. The Vet's Daughter isn't autofiction, if you want to use that word, the same way that Our Spoons came from Woolworths, or some of the others are. Shall I just summarize The Vet’s Daughter?

KIM: Yeah, that would be perfect. Yep.

AVRIL: Um, the plot centers on a 17-year-old girl called Alice Rowlands, who lives at home with her mother, who is dying, it seems, of cancer and her bullying father. Her father is a vet, but he's a very unpleasant vet who doesn't actually like animals. He sends a lot of them off to be, um, taken to bits and he gets paid for it. He's not a nice man at all. He's very bullying. And one of the awful first things that happens in the novel is that the mother who is dying is put down, you know. In the UK, we talk about “putting down” animals when they're old and ill, you know, the vet kindly puts them down. Well, her father “puts down” his wife with an injection, just as he would have put down a sick animal. And quite soon after he takes a mistress, Rosa Fisher, who works in the local pub. And she's a very brash woman, very loud-mouthed. And Rosa takes Alice under her wings and decides that she ought to see a bit more of life, and takes her to meet a young waiter she knows. This young waiter tries to rape Alice. It was a rape attempt, but she's absolutely traumatized by what happened. There's a nice cleaning lady called Mrs. Churchill, and she goes to Mrs. Churchill’s small house to take refuge there. And it's when she's in that house that she first levitates, and we'll look at that scene in a moment. Um, the novel turns very dark then, because the father, once he realizes his daughter can levitate, decides to make money out of it. He decides to exploit her talent. And I won't go into the details of the ending because, um, it is a very disturbing ending. Again, it takes your breath away. It's a very odd ending, but a very powerful ending. So shall we talk about levitation? Because that's something really extraordinary, isn't it?

AMY: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I just kept thinking about the idea of an out of body experience and… 

KIM: Yes. Trauma. 

AMY: It seems like she was writing this before that notion was really talked about.

AVRIL: Yes, I think that's absolutely right. You get it in Our Spoons Come From Woolworths, when Sophia falls ill with scarlet fever and she's on a bed and she feels as if she's going up in the air. That's, however, more recognizable. I mean I'm sure you've read, too, about people who are near death or seriously ill, who feel that they're rising out of their body and looking down. It's quite a common experience, which is well-documented, But in The Vet's Daughter, it's not just an imagined sense of being out of your body. She really seems to levitate. And I've talked to Barbara's son about this, and he said she insisted that levitation could happen. For her, levitation was a real phenomenon; rare, but possible. So, the first time that we see Alice levitating, it's after this rape attempt, when she's gone to Mrs. Churchill's house. And I'll just read a bit, because it's described very well.

In the night I was awake and floating. As I went up, the blankets fell to the floor. I could feel nothing below me – and nothing above until I came near the ceiling and it was hard to breathe there. I thought, ‘I mustn't break the gas globe.’ I felt it carefully with my hands, and something very light fell in them, and it was the broken mantle. I kept very still up there because I was afraid of breaking other things in that small crowded room; but quite soon, it seemed, I was gently coming down again. I folded my hands over my chest and kept very straight, and floated down to the couch where I'd been lying. I was not afraid, but very calm and peaceful. In the morning I knew it wasn't a dream because the blankets were still on the floor, and I saw the gas mantle was broken and the chalky powder was still on my hands. 

It's an extraordinary scene, and I think you can read it in whichever way you want, really. You know, if you want to believe in levitation, you can believe it really happened. But if you don't, you can read it as a metaphor for PTSD, you know, that she's rising above the horror of what she's experienced emotionally, if you like, that it's a coping device. And psychiatrists talk about some psychological dissociation often seen in abuse victims or someone who's been through trauma. And in that sense, I think she was well ahead of her time, you know? She was sort of writing about this sense of dissociation, metaphorically, if you like. I think it’s quite strange, and about nine years later, Marquez published that very famous book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which a priest levitates and a young woman disappears into the sky. And this was, you know, lauded as magical realism, breaking new ground in writing. But she was doing this before this book was published, in 1959. In some ways it's too crude to describe the book as magical realism or gothic or uncanny. She simply uses those effects. She weaves them in and out of a context that is realist.

KIM: Right. And there's so much cruelty in the novel. There's cruelty to animals. There's cruelty to Alice and her mother as well. 

AMY: Yeah, and I think we should point out to listeners, though, because you hear that and then you maybe think, “Oh, this isn't a book I would be able to get through. This would be too triggering or whatever.” I'm not sure why, but the experience of reading the novel is not awful, despite all the awful things that happen in the story. And I don't know how she accomplishes this. It's pretty remarkable, but I couldn't put it down. It's almost like I was able to disassociate from the horrible things and enjoy the beauty of the writing. 

AVRIL: I think that's right. I think that's my experience when I first read it too. I mean, another writer would have made this very grim, you know, it would have been dark and tragic all the way through, but she always interweaves humor into her novels. Barbara Comyns was a great fan of Dickens. You get this in Dickens, too. Dickens’s novels can be heartbreaking, but there are always these comic characters, sometimes caricatures, peppering the margins of the novel, who amuse and divert the reader. And Barbara does this, too. There are these moments of kindness and moments of humor that leaven the darkness of the story itself.

KIM: Can you talk a little bit about the kind of response the book got when it was published? Um, how did it sell in comparison to her other novels? 

AVRIL: Who was Changed and Who Was Dead really divided readers, and John Betjeman, the poet, who was quite an influential literary figure, gave it a terrible review. So, she was very worried about how this one would be received, but it did actually get a great deal of praise, from famous writers. Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene both wrote wonderful reviews, and it was generally very well-received in the press as something new and extraordinary that works, you know, against all the odds; a novel about levitation works and was convincing, both on the story level and emotionally. She was absolutely relieved. She was living in Spain at the time, but she came back to London to see her agent and to do various things shortly after it was published, and she was so relieved to find out that it had been well reviewed. And it wasn't like a bestseller today, you know. It sold reasonably well, but she never made a fortune from her novels. I think they're an acquired taste. And I do find she's a bit like Marmite in that she divides readers. 

AMY: No! We're not going to allow that metaphor! I refuse.

AVRIL: I chose this book for a book group, and I paired it with another book, it was quite different. And, uh, about two thirds of the group loved it, and the other third said, “Oh, no, we can't be doing with that,” you know. And her novels still divide readers, but for me, once you've read a Barbara Comyns book, you just don't forget it, you know? They stay with you.

KIM: Absolutely. Can we talk about how important Virago Press was to her ultimate success and her legacy?

AVRIL: Yes, Virago Press was a feminist press set up by Carmen Callil in 1973, um, its agenda was to bring back women's writing into the public eye, particularly women who'd been forgotten. And in 1978, Carmen Callil created a series called Virago Classics to do just that, to bring back forgotten women writers. And, um, she reissued The Vet's Daughter in that series in 1981. And she quickly reprinted Sisters by a River, which was Barbara Comyns's first book, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, and The Skin Chairs, which is now out of print. Um, Graham Greene was slightly instrumental in this. Graham Greene pops up now and again in Barbara's writing career. After the war he became a part-time director at a publisher called Eyre and Spottiswoode, and he persuaded them to publish Sisters By A River. Later, Barbara's agent sent Graham Green the manuscript to The Vet's Daughter, and he thought it was terrific. It was then called The Long White Dress, but he persuaded Barbara to change the title to The Vet's Daughter, and he sent it to the chairman of Heinemann, who was his own publisher, and they published it. And in the early 1980s, he wrote to Carmen Callil and said, “I see you've got this new set of books coming out in this new series. Why don't you consider publishing Barbara Comyns?” And Carmen Callil had already been sent The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara's agent, but that persuaded her to look at the others too. So Barbara then became popular. People wrote to her saying, “Oh, I thought you were dead,” and “This is wonderful, you know, I can now get hold of this book in Virago Modern Classics.” And she had another wave of fame. She was interviewed on the radio, people wanted to see her and wrote to her, “When was her next book coming out?” You know, suddenly she was alive again. And also the royalties brought her money, and she was delighted about that, because she was never rich. I mean, Richard Comyns Carr came from a very illustrious family, but he was hopeless with money, and they were often (even though he had a career in MI6) they were often a bit hard-up. So she was very pleased that this money came in during the 1980s. So Carmen Callill did her a great favor. Um, The Skin Chairs, which was reissued by Carmen Callil in that series, is now out of print, and it's one of my missions to get it reprinted if I can. I'd really like to see it back in print because it's a very powerful novel, but with humor in it as well, like all the others. So, uh, that's one of the next things I want to do.

AMY: Yeah, I remember having my interest piqued reading your book, when I read about the premise of The Skin Chairs. And also House of Dolls. That's another one that seems like it would be up my alley.

AVRIL: Yes, Graham Greene didn't like that one, but I don't think he understood it. I mean, now it's much easier for women of our generation to understand that it's actually a novel about women and money. And it's very, very funny and irreverent, um, irreverent about men particularly. And it's worth reading. The others I would urge listeners to perhaps find if they haven't read them are (if you like the realist stuff she writes) you'll also like A Touch of Mistletoe. If you're a fan of The Vet's Daughter, then you would also enjoy The Juniper Tree, which was her last novel. After A Touch of Mistletoe, she said she'll never write again, but she did. She wrote The Juniper Tree, which was published in 1985, which is one of her best novels, I think.

KIM: I can't wait to read more of Comyns’s work. I mean, this has just been fantastic. 

AMY: I just want to say, also, we've barely scratched the surface of Barbara Comyns. I mean, you mentioned her husband was in MI6, they were hanging out with, like, infamous spies. There is so, so much, we would need another full hour to cover all the interesting facets of her life!

KIM: You’ve got to read this book.

AMY: Yeah, so run out, everyone, and get Avril's biography. It's amazing. 

KIM: Avril, we just want to thank you so much for joining us today, and congratulations on the release of your wonderful book.

AVRIL: Thank you for having me. It's been very interesting to talk to you.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. We'll be back next week with another bonus episode exclusively for our Patreon listeners. And I actually think that Barbara Comyns may have inspired me. I want to investigate some women writers who kept unusual pets. So feel free to join me for that discussion. And the rest of us can all meet back in two weeks to explore another lost lady of lit.

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.