The Vet's Daughter

A small Gothic masterpieceTold in the first person by a young girl, [The Vet’s Daughter] 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 wonderful and original novelThe 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 The Vet’s Daughter The Vet’s Daughter is Barbara Comyns’s fourth and most startling novel … she shows mastery of the structures of a fast-moving narrative and a consistent backdrop to the ecstasies and agonies of the human condition * Spectator *

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.

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