Barbara Comyns

Barbara Comyns was the working name of Barbara Irene Veronica Comyns-Carr, an English novelist born in Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, on December 27, 1907. Her fiction is known for a flat, faux-naive narrative voice that intensifies rather than undercuts the strangeness of the events it describes, a tone often associated with magic realism. The Vet's Daughter (1959) tells the story of Alice Rowlands in matter-of-fact, deadpan prose that renders its climactic, fantastical turn as though it were simply another fact of life. The Juniper Tree (1985), her late reworking of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, was subtitled by its author as being "far too macabre for adult reading." Comyns died in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, in 1992.