Barbara Pym (1913-1980)

When, in 1977, The (London) Times Literary Supplement asked noted critics to name the most underrated author of the past 75 years, the only person chosen twice was Barbara Pym. She had started writing in 1936 but found no publisher until 1950, and after attracting critical praise but few buyers for six novels from 1950 to 1961, had been rejected by publishers and forgotten by the public. Her favorite subject—middle-aged spinsters dealing with unrequited love and the small indignities of life in church-centered communities—was hardly attractive to Beats, Postmodernists, or Post-Colonialists.

Yet these very amusing comedies of manners are screens that hide serious questions as absorbing in our time as in hers. Pym has been compared to Jane Austen, and indeed, behind their slyly straight-faced narrative personas, both of them are deeply concerned with snobbery, social power and manipulation, self-deception, and the difficulties of being a woman in their societies. But whereas Austen’s young heroines find love and happiness in the end, Pym’s protagonists know better than to expect that much.

Any of Pym’s books will provide a delightful read. The second one she wrote, Crampton Hodnet, though focusing on women, includes what must be one of the earliest versions of the campus story about a middle-aged, married professor and an adoring student. It’s very funny, and rings deeply true. Another of my favorites, Jane and Prudence, gives us Prudence, a beautiful woman getting past marriageable age who has enjoyed many unhappy love-affairs, and Jane, a happily married woman, who is nevertheless a misplaced person. Her husband is a clergyman, and she tries to be a good clergyman’s wife and a good mother, but she’s a scholar of 17th Century poetry cut off from her true work, and she is both absurd and endearing as she gets on with daily life.

Pym’s narratives are a tissue of ridicule—so continuous that it’s hard to extract short quotations to give a taste of her style. One will have to suffice

“He lives with his aunt,” Miss Trapnell explained. “His parents are dead, you see.”

“Oh?” Prudence was curious in spite of herself.

“He is an orphan,” interposed Miss Clothier by way of explanation

The Bellingham Public Library has a fine collection of Pym’s novels. Besides those I’ve named, Excellent Women is a good introduction.