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Born in 1909 at Bidford-on-Avon, Barbara Comyns was educated mainly by governesses until she went to art schools in Stratfordupon-Avon and London. She started writing fiction at the age of ten and her first novel, Sisters by a River, was published in 1947. She also worked in an advertising agency, a typewriting bureau, dealt in old cars and antique furniture, bred poodles, converted and let flats, and exhibited pictures in The London Group. She was married first in 1931, to an artist, and for the second time in 1945. With her second husband she lived in Spain for eighteen years. She died in 1992.A small <b>Gothic masterpiece</b>
Told in the first person by a young girl, [<i>The Vet's Daughter</i>] has the vividness and innocence [and] the revelatory intensity of the narrations of Pip or young David Copperfield. It projects its fantastic story with a tangible realness and manages to make public and inevitable a realm of private sensation close to nightmare . . . A<b> wonderful</b> and <b>original </b>novel
The strange offbeat talent of Miss Comyns and that innocent eye which observes with childlike simplicity the most fantastic or the most ominous occurrence, these have never, I think, been more impressively exercised than in <i>The Vet's Daughter </i>
<i>The Vet's Daughter</i> is Barbara Comyns's fourth and most startling novel . . . <b>she shows mastery of the structures of a fast-moving narrative</b> and a consistent backdrop to the ecstasies and agonies of the human condition
Spectator
'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
INTRODUCED BY JANE GARDAM
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 a house full of screeching animals in Edwardian South London, Alice lives in the shadow of her domineering father. Longing to escape, she retreats ever deeper into a world of memories, fantasies and rapturous longings - until she discovers an extraordinary secret power of her own. But the strange events that unfold lead her, dressed in bridal white, to a scene of ecstatic triumph and disaster among the crowds on Clapham Common.
Blackly funny and indelibly haunting, The Vet's Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge.
'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