About this episode

The episode explores the life and works of the often-overlooked novelist Barbara Comyns through discussions with her biographer and a bookseller.

Any mention of Barbara Comyns usually brings an ‘I know the name but I don’t know anything about her’ kind of response. In this quarter’s literary podcast, presenter Rosie Goldsmith and the Slightly Foxed Editors sit down with Barbara’s biographer Avril Horner and Brett Wolstencroft, Manager of Daunt Books, to discover who this fascinating and forgotten novelist really was. Though Barbara enjoyed success in the later part of her life, and a revival with Virago Books in the 1980s, it’s indicative of how thoroughly she disappeared from view that, as Avril tells us, she had difficulty in placing her wonderful biography, Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence , which was finally published this year. Avril describes how, when working on her biography, she came across a huge cache of letters from the 1930s owned by Barbara’s granddaughter, some of which ‘made her gasp’, and the story of Barbara’s life in London is indeed often shocking. It’s a tale of almost unimaginable poverty, of tangled affairs with unsuitable men, of a grim experience of childbirth, and countless moves from one bleak rented property to another. Yet after repeatedly hitting rock bottom Barbara always courageously…

People in this episode

Host: Rosie Goldsmith

Guests: Avril Horner, Brett Wolstencroft

Topics covered

• Barbara Comyns
• literary biography
• forgotten authors
• women writers
• 20th century literature

Keywords

• Barbara Comyns
• biography
• literature
• women's writing
• 20th century

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Virago Books

Books & works: Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence

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