Barbara Comyns

Barbara Irene Veronica Comyns Carr (1907 – 15 July 1992), pseudonym Barbara Comyns, was an English writer and artist.

Barbara Irene Veronica Bayley was born in the Warwickshire village of Bidford-on-Avon in 1907. She was one of six children and the family home was Bell Court on the banks of the River Avon. Comyns later recorded her childhood in her novel Sisters by a River.

After attending an art school in nearby Stratford-upon-Avon, Comyns moved to London to attend Heatherley School of Fine Art. In 1931 she married fellow artist and Warwickshire native John Pemberton, who was the nephew of the London Group president and noted artist Rupert Lee. Comyns and John exhibited their work with the London Group of artists in 1934. Comyns mixed amongst the artistic community of London and she knew Dylan Thomas and Augustus John. Comyns recorded a fictionalised version of her marriage to John, which was fraught with poverty and infidelity, in her novel Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. Comyns had two children during her marriage to John, but the marriage broke down in 1935.

During the late 1930s, Comyns began a relationship with the black marketeer Arthur Price. The couple lived with Comyns's two children at various London addresses. Comyns generated money by breeding poodles, renovating pianos, dealing in antiques and classic cars and drawing for commercial advertisements. Comyns wrote about her relationship and her commercial endeavours in her novel Mr. Fox. With the outbreak of World War II, Comyns's poverty increased and her relationship with Arthur broke down. Comyns became a cook in a Hertfordshire country house, where she and her children lived until the end of the war and where she began to write stories to entertain them.

In 1945 Comyns married Richard Strettell Comyns Carr (who was the son of the barrister and Liberal MP Arthur Strettell Comyns Carr and the grandson of the dramatist Joseph Comyns Carr). Richard was a civil servant based in the Foreign Office and a friend and colleague of Kim Philby. It was on her second honeymoon that Comyns conceived the idea for her most acclaimed novel The Vet's Daughter. The couple lived in London where Comyns began to write professionally.

...
Wikipedia