We’re big fans of the Virago Modern Classics collection, the iconic green-spined books denoting wonderful women writers saved for posterity (and often from neglect). A personal favourite on this inspiring list is the 1959 gem, The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns, an eccentric tale tinged with melancholy and magic. Set in a rather gloomy Edwardian South London, it tells the story of a naive young woman named Alice, her confined girlhood, strange otherworldly gifts, and relationship with a father who must surely rank as one of the most monstrous parents in all literature.
When we first meet Alice, she is living in Battersea, on a road where a large railway arch squats ‘like a heavy rainbow’. Near this arch there is a vet’s house and surgery with a lamp outside. Here Alice lives with an assortment of poorly animal patients, her meekly dying mother, and irascible father, whose dyed black eyebrows and waxed moustache exude a pantomime villain vibe, startlingly reinforced by Alice’s assertion that instead of euthanising ailing and unwanted animals, he sells them to the local vivisectionist (puppies for a pound a pop).
Alice spends her days engaged in domestic drudgery, assisting with animal care and observing her father’s unutterable cruelties, whilst her mother’s life force drains away. Ostensibly small and restricted, Alice’s life is also one of rich interiority, her subconscious willing her to escape. And so it happens, that in the aftermath of Mother’s inevitable death (two days after Father had prematurely ordered her coffin measuring), a sequence of correspondingly traumatic events causes Alice to experience the first in a series of life-changing out-of-body experiences.
A deliciously odd novel, The Vet’s Daughter is laced with gothic motifs, dark humour, and magical realism. Comyns’ suburban London is a grey, oppressive affair, reflective of Alice’s everyday life. Flourishes of colour are few and far between: an unexpected trip to Harrods, where the carpets are like luscious moss and Alice admires the glowing fabrics and splendid hats, a flirtation with a handsome sailor whose touch thrills her, ‘…then I knew what the word rapture meant.’
For the most part, however, Alice finds rapture in visions and daydreams. Sometimes whilst toiling away in the kitchen, her imagination whisks her away to other places, a shimmering mystical mountain, or a jungle of exotic flowers with giant leaves against a blazing sky, ‘the sun shining between them like golden swords; and I could hold out my hands and feel the warmth’.
This practice of self-soothing builds to monumental proportions as subsequent events, plus her father and his new lover (a barmaid from local pub, The Trumpet, gloriously nicknamed ‘the strumpet from The Trumpet’) conspire against her. Consolation is set to arrive with Alice’s dawning realisation that she isn’t ‘earthbound like other people’.
With its tremendous and devastating denouement, The Vet’s Daughter is an unforgettable read. Fans will be thrilled to learn that the majority of Comyns’ novels are currently in print. Spread the word.
The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns is published by Virago, 132 pages.
