I was reading the works of as many mid-century women writers as possible in order to firm up what was still at that stage a truly nebulous thesis proposal. I wasn’t just married, but I was the same age as Sophia, and living with a partner for the first time that year, and although we weren’t as poor as Sophia and Charles – poverty becomes a defining factor in their story – I was a struggling student, in the first year of my PhD, feeling more than a little overwhelmed by the task ahead of me and wondering whether I’d made the right decision. I was living in Kentish Town in North-west London at the time, only ten minutes away from Haverstock Hill, the road on which the novel’s 21-year-old heroine Sophia Fairclough and her husband Charles set up home as a newly married couple in the 1930s. My own introduction to Comyns was in the form of her second novel, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. There’s something about the work of Barbara Comyns that makes discovering her novels feel like stumbling across a well-kept secret.
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