The stark horror of Barbara Comyns’s fiction was all too autobiographical

Barbara Comyns’s reputation rises and falls like a Mexican wave, making her one of the most rediscovered novelists of recent times. She’s credited with anticipating Angela Carter and for being in the vanguard of tackling themes of traumatic dissociation and the realities of childbirth. Yet younger, trendier writers have regularly eclipsed her.

Every fan remembers their first Comyns novel: the visceral jolt of black humour, the suckerpunch of stark horror. Knowing that she drew from life, we have longed for a biography, and hooray, it’s finally here. Avril Horner, emeritus professor of English at Kingston University, has given us one packed with incidents both monumental and mundane. It skilfully interweaves life and literature and draws on family memories and unpublished private papers.

Horner promises not to ‘raid the work for evidence of the writer’s life’; but the truth is, a lot that is described in the novels did happen – not only macabre details, but sad episodes familiar from Comyns’s depictions of thwarted relationships and downtrodden women.