Barbara Pym is one my favourite writers, someone who deserves to be better known than she is. She was born in Shropshire in 1913. Her father was a solicitor, and her mother was an organist in their local church. Her mother’s involvement in the parish and what it did to their social life had a clear impact on Pym’s novels which are full of entertaining vicars and curates. After the war, she worked at the International African Institute in London - this explains why anthropologists also feature reasonably often in her fiction.
She published her first book in 1950. This was a novel called Some Tame Gazelle. She went on to publish five more novels all the way through to 1961, all of which were moderately successful and rather well received. In 1963, however, when she submitted her seventh book to her publisher, she found herself suddenly out of favour. Her long-time publisher, as well as several others that she approached, unanimously rejected it.
The publishing world deemed her work old fashioned, that was no longer a market for the kind of novels she wrote, gentle social comedies that focused on women’s lives. This was a crushing blow to Pym, being cast out like this. In the years that followed, she didn’t stop writing but she was disheartened that nobody seemed to want her stories anymore.
And then it all turned on its head again. In 1977, the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) did a feature on the most underrated novelists of the century. Barbara Pym was the only writer to be named twice on this list. After nearly fourteen years in the publishing wilderness, almost overnight, everything changed for Pym. Her seventh book, which was probably languishing in a publisher’s office somewhere was published almost immediately.
This novel, The Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize that same year. Another novel followed in 1978. Pym passed away two years later. Some of her earlier works that were rejected during what we can call her wilderness years, were published posthumously. Her works were then published in the U.S and translated into several foreign languages.
Despite the TLS feature and the renewed interest in her work, she is still not a writer who is very widely known, and it’s always a joyous event when at the bookshop we encounter a reader who has read and enjoyed her work.
My own discovery of Barbara Pym came in 2015 through an article in The New Yorker written by Hannah Rosefield. I began with the book that is generally considered her best novel and the one that is often recommended as the place to start – Excellent Women.
This is the story of Mildred Lathbury, an unmarried young woman living in a small flat in London, who has a part-time job at the Society for the Care of Distressed Gentlewomen. Mildred has a quiet everyday routine that includes work, her church, and her meals for one. She is a person who tends to be taken for granted, who is always willing to go out of her way to offer help, and the help is usually taken. Her quiet life is disrupted when she gets entangled with her new neighbours, a couple who seem to be having a marital crisis of some sort.
I also enjoyed Jane and Prudence – the story of an unlikely friendship. Jane Cleveland, in her forties, is the wife of a Vicar. She's disorganised, slightly absent-minded, and rather single at heart. She has no interest in and no idea about managing a home, and she lives in her head. Jane’s best friend Prudence Bates is quite a bit younger than Jane, elegant and single and tends to have the most unsuitable affairs. Jane would love to see Prudence happily settled and so she invites her to the village where her husband Nicholas is vicar, to try and find a match for her. Needless to say, things don’t go as planned.
Another of her books that I very much enjoyed is Some Tame Gazelle, Pym’s first published novel. I absolutely adored this story of the middle-aged sisters Harriet and Belinda who live together in an English village, where they are active in their local church, and frequently host the curates who seem to come and go, taking them under their wing. Harriet is used to receiving, and rejecting an annual proposal by a local suitor, while the meeker Belinda quietly nurses an unrequited love for a married archdeacon.
Any of these novels would be a great place to start. Pym’s work is unique. I read a description somewhere that she was the chronicler of quiet lives. This is a perfect description. The world her characters inhabited has obviously changed tremendously, but the characters themselves and their emotions and inner lives and everyday struggles…these are timeless.