Norma Clarke at Literary Review:
Barbara Comyns (1907–92) was a true original. The word ‘unique’ was often applied to her writing, along with ‘bizarre’, ‘comic’ and ‘macabre’. Her characteristic tone of faux-naïf innocence was established in her first novel, Sisters by a River (1947), which, as the Chicago Tribune observed in 2015, mixed ‘dispassion, levity and veiled ferocity’. Her friend and fellow novelist Ursula Holden put it this way: ‘Barbara Comyns deftly balances savagery with innocence, depravity with Gothic interludes.’ That balance of savagery and innocence is the underlying theme of Avril Horner’s compelling biography of an extraordinary woman.
Sisters by a River was avowedly autobiographical. Comyns began it as an exercise in recalling scenes from her childhood for the benefit of her offspring. Virago reissued the novel in 2013 (complete with the misspellings that appeared in the original) and Barbara Trapido wrote an introduction. Trapido described family life in the book as a ‘minefield of lunacy and violence’, with adults ‘as arbitrary and dangerous as tigers’.
more here.