Born in Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, to Margaret Eva Mary (née Fenn) and Albert Edward Bayley, Comyns was the fourth of six children.
Comyns generated money by modelling, converting houses into apartments, breeding poodles, renovating pianos, dealing in antique furniture and classic cars and drawing for commercial advertisements.
[2] While Comyns was writing Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, a friend found the manuscript she had written in Hertfordshire and encouraged her to publish it.
Greene later described her to Max Reinhardt as "a crazy but interesting novelist whom I started when I was at Eyre & Spottiswoode but whom Jerrold abandoned with all my other authors [...] when I left".
[13][14] The Comyns Carrs moved to Spain and lived briefly on Ibiza until 1958 and then in Barcelona, from where she published The Vet's Daughter; Out of the Red, Into the Blue; The Skin Chairs; Birds in Tiny Cages; and A Touch of Mistletoe.
In 1974, with increasing inflation in Spain and a decline in the pound, the couple returned to England, moving first to Twickenham, and later, Richmond.
There was renewed interest in her work when Virago began to reprint some of her novels in the 1980s, which Greene had also recommended to Carmen Callil.
[19][20][21] In 2024, a biography, Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner, was published by Manchester University Press.