Jane Gardam on Barbara Comyns – essay

The Vet’s Daughter is Barbara Comyns’s fourth and most startling novel. Written in 1959 when she was 50 it is the first in which she shows mastery of the structures of a fast-moving narrative and a consistent backdrop to the ecstasies and agonies of the human condition. It was received with excitement, widely reviewed, praised by Graham Greene, reprinted, made into a play, serialised by the BBC, and adapted as a musical (called The Clapham Wonder) by Sandy Wilson of The Boyfriend.

But although the book has been kept in print by Virago since 1981 its reputation has faded, probably because the shock of the magical realism of its final chapter has been swamped by the tsunami of fantasy and magic that has almost engulfed the later reading world in the past 20 years. The Vet’s Daughter is not about ‘enchantment’, it is about evil, the evil that can exist in the most humdrum people. Without being specifically feminist it describes the evil treatment of powerless Edwardian wives and daughters — a theme in several of her other novels — not as satire, like Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, not meant to be funny or portentous, but as a statement of fact.

Barbara Comyns, like Stella Gibbons, lived in a leafy London suburb for many years, though less quietly! I cannot now remember the year I met her in Twickenham. I lived in Wimbledon, and one morning I walked into the small and excellent private library on the high street where you could borrow a book for sixpence a week (ah, lost world!) and asked the erudite, formidable woman who owned it — we called her the Dong with the luminous nose — if she had any good new novels and she said: ‘Certainly not. There hasn’t been a good original English novel since The Vet’s Daughter.’