Barbara Comyns
eBook - ePub

Barbara Comyns

A savage innocence

  1. 372 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Barbara Comyns

A savage innocence

About this book

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 that are unique in the English language.Comyns turned her hand to many jobs in order to survive, from artist's model to restoring pianos. Hundreds of unpublished letters reveal an occasionally desperate but resourceful and witty woman whose complicated life ranged from enduring poverty when young to mixing with spivs,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 not only excavates Comyns's life but also 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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Yes, you can access Barbara Comyns by Avril Horner in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literatur & Literarische Biographien. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-title page
  3. Title page
  4. Copyright page
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. Contents
  8. Introduction
  9. 1: From Bell Court to Amsterdam
  10. 2: Portrait of the artist as a young woman
  11. 3: Lovers and others
  12. 4: Desperate measures
  13. 5: The Pemberton persecution
  14. 6: Mr Fox
  15. 7: Becoming a writer
  16. 8: Becoming Comyns
  17. 9: Spies, lies and fictions
  18. 10: Ibiza
  19. 11: Settling in Barcelona
  20. 12: The San Roque venture
  21. 13: The return to England
  22. 14: Hauntings
  23. 15: Legacies
  24. Afterword
  25. Acknowledgements
  26. Illustrations
  27. Novels by Barbara Comyns
  28. Notes
  29. Index