Barbara Comyns

In a vicious tale of horror, a veterinarian moves into a London suburb after his wife dies, hires a bizarre new housekeeper, and discovers his daughter has new, terrifying powers. Original.

The Vet's Daughter

Fiction. This is the story of the Willoweed family and the English village in which they live. It begins mid-flood, ducks swimming in the drawing-room windows, "quacking their approval" as they sail around the room. "What about my rose beds?" demands Grandmother Willoweed. Her son shouts down her ear-trumpet that the garden is submerged, dead animals everywhere, she will be lucky to get a bunch. Then the miller drowns himself...then the butcher slits his throat...and a series of gruesome deaths plagues the villagers. The newspaper asks, "Who will be smitten by this fatal madness next?" Through it all, Comyns' unique voice weaves a text as wonderful as it is horrible, as beautiful as it is cruel. Originally published in England in 1954, this "overlooked small masterpiece" is a twisted, tragicomic gem.

A Novel

Who was Changed and who was Dead

In their idyllic garden, Gertrude and Bernard forge a perfect triangle of friendship with Bella, the scarred mother of an illegitimate child. Then Gertrude conceives the child which has long eluded her, and the spell breaks into foreboding, menace and madness. By the author of " The Vet's Daughter" .

The Juniper Tree

Pretty, unworldly Sophia is twenty-one years old and hastily married to a young painter called Charles. An artist's model with an eccentric collection of pets, she is ill-equipped to cope with the bohemian London of the 1930s, where poverty, babies (however much loved) and husband conspire to torment her. Hoping to add some spice to her life, Sophia takes up with Peregrine, a dismal, ageing critic, and comes to regret her marriage - and her affair. But in this case virtue is more than its own reward, for repentance brings an abrupt end to the cycle of unsold pictures, unpaid bills and unwashed dishes . . .

Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

On the banks of the River Avon, five sisters are born. The seasons come and go, the girls take their lessons under the ash tree, and always there is the sound of water swirling through the weir. Then, unexpectedly, an air of decay descends upon the house: ivy grows unchecked over the windows, angry shouts split the summer air, the milk sours in the larder and their father takes out his gun. Tragedy strikes the family, and before long the furniture is being auctioned off and the sisters dispersed among relatives. In her daring first novel, originally published in 1947, Barbara Comyns' unique young heroine relates the vivid, funny and bittersweet story of a childhood.

Sisters by a River

When her father dies, ten-year-old Frances, her mother and siblings are taken under the wing of their horsey relations, led by the formidable Aunt Lawrence. Living in patronised poverty isn't fun, but Frances makes friends with Mrs Alexander, who has a collection of monkeys and a yellow motorcar.

The Skin Chairs

“I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.” So begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns’s beguiling novel is far from tragic, despite the harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one and naïve when she marries fellow artist Charles. She seems hardly fonder of her husband than she is of her pet newt; she can’t keep house (everything she cooks tastes of soap); and she mistakes morning sickness for the aftereffects of a bad batch of strawberries. England is in the middle of the Great Depression, and the money Sophia makes from the occasional modeling gig doesn’t make up for her husband’s indifference to paying the rent. Predictably, the marriage falters; not so predictably, Sophia’s artlessness will be the very thing that turns her life around.

In this Freudian fantasy, Alice Rowlands lives with a father glowering 'like a disappointed thunderstorm', a fast-fading mother and a beastly menagerie in a dark house in 1930s Battersea. With her mother's death, life becomes almost intolerable for Alice, whose father treats her as a slave. Then kind 'Blinkers', the vet's assistant, arranges for her to live with his mother in the country. There, Alice revels in the beauty of nature and falls head over heels for Nicholas, the lovely boy who takes her skating, motoring, and smiles at her. But Nicholas has other fish to fry, and Alice is forced to fall back on a talent for rising above her troubles . . . Back in London, that talent comes to the attention of her father -- who rapaciously propels Alice towards fame on Clapham Common . . .

“Comyns’ novel is deranged in ways that shouldn’t be disclosed.” —Ben Marcus This is the story of the Willoweed family and the English village in which they live. It begins mid-flood, ducks swimming in the drawing-room windows, “quacking their approval” as they sail around the room. “What about my rose beds?” demands Grandmother Willoweed. Her son shouts down her ear-trumpet that the garden is submerged, dead animals everywhere, she will be lucky to get a bunch. Then the miller drowns himself . . . then the butcher slits his throat . . . and a series of gruesome deaths plagues the villagers. The newspaper asks, “Who will be smitten by this fatal madness next?” Through it all, Comyns' unique voice weaves a text as wonderful as it is horrible, as beautiful as it is cruel. Originally published in England in 1954, this “overlooked small masterpiece” is a twisted, tragicomic gem.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

The House of Dolls

'A small Gothic masterpiece . . . I have read it many times, and with every re-read I marvel again at its many qualities' SARAH WATERS 'A wonderful and original novel' ALAN HOLLINGHURST 'The strange off-beat talent of Barbara Comyns [whose] innocent eye observes with child-like simplicity the most fantastic or the most ominous occurrence' GRAHAM GREENE 'Quite simply, Comyns writes like no one else' MAGGIE O'FARRELL In the brown hall my mother was standing; and she looked at me with her sad eyes half-covered by their heavy lids . . . if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her. In Edwardian South London, Alice lives in the shadow of her domineering father, a vet who treats his family with contempt, in a house full of screeching animals. After her mother's death, she is appalled by her father's brash, lascivious new girlfriend. But as Alice retreats ever deeper into a world of memories, fantasies and rapturous longings, she discovers an extraordinary secret power of her own - which, finally, will lead her to a crowd on Clapham Common in a scene of ecstatic triumph and disaster. Blackly funny and indelibly haunting, The Vet's Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. INTRODUCED BY JANE GARDAM

A Virago Modern Classic

A Touch of Mistletoe

La hija del veterinario

Bella Winter tiene una cicatriz en la cara a raíz de un accidente de coche; conducía su novio, un tipo tacaño que no la apreciaba. Embarazada de un inmigrante al que conoció en una fiesta en un piso cochambroso de Bayswater y nunca más volvió a ver, tiene ahora una niña de meses negra, que oculta a su madre, una mujer que nunca parece haberla querido. Pero encuentra un trabajo que le encanta en una pequeña tienda de antigüedades en Richmond, hace nuevos amigos y empieza a tener la sensación de que la vida al fin le sonríe. El pasado, cómo no, vuelve, pero tal vez en condiciones que permitan reconciliarse con él; y el presente abre nuevos horizontes, quizá engañosos pero en principio muy felices. En El enebro (1985), Barbara Comyns habla con singular magia y penetración de todas las cosas y personas –de un arcón a un amante o una cocinera− que pasan a formar parte de la vida, de cómo entran y salen, y de cómo configuramos nuestro espacio con lo nuevo y con lo que se pierde o muere... y todo en una insólita y compasiva versión de uno de los cuentos más terroríficos de los hermanos Grimm. Como dice Margaret Drabble, la novela es «un sofisticado relato de emociones adultas, narrado sin sentimentalismo, y sin ninguna idea preconcebida y convencional de cómo debe vivirse la vida».

El enebro

Mary was the eldist of the family, Mammy was only eighteen when she had her, and was awfully frit of her, but Daddy thought she was lovely and called her his little Microbe The river is the Avon, and on its banks the five sisters are born.

Barbara Comyns

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