The fascinating Miss Pym

A chronicler of the overlooked

Last week I wrote about the poet Philip Larkin’s correspondence with his mother Eva. This reminded me of another important relationship in his life, with the English novelist Barbara Pym. Despite their different personalities and writing styles, Larkin was one of Pym’s most devoted fans, admiring what he described as her ‘rueful yet courageous acceptance of things which I think more relevant to life as most of us have to live it’. This post is about how their literary friendship brought about a change in her life that she could never have predicted.

Virago Modern Classics editions of Barbara Pym's novels in 2022

The ascent of Barbara Pym   

It’s cheering to see that the English novelist Barbara Pym is having yet another renaissance in the 2020s. The feminist press Virago has recently reissued nine of her mid-twentieth-century novels in its distinguished ‘Virago Modern Classics’ series, with striking cover designs in zingy colours, and blurbs by Richard Osman and Anne Tyler. In 2022 Pym’s second novel Excellent Women, first published in 1952, the year that that Queen Elizabeth II acceded to the throne, topped The Times critics’ list of the best novels of the last seventy years. ‘There’s probably no more perfect comedy in the English language,’ Claire Allfree writes.

Many readers discovered the ‘perennially under-read’ Barbara Pym thanks to Paula Byrne’s picaresque biography The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym. The first half of Byrne’s lively and enjoyable book traces Pym’s journey from her beginnings as a gangly ‘Shropshire lass’ to becoming an Oxford undergraduate in the early 1930s, followed by wartime work in the Censorship Office and as a ‘Wren’ in Naples. Byrne is good on Barbara Pym’s early literary promise and her disastrous entanglements with a series of unsuitable men, including a protracted holiday romance with a German S.S. officer in the late 1930s.

 

But Pym’s most passionate love affair was with her writing, and after the war she showed a dogged determination to establish herself as an author. She was just 21 when she wrote the first draft of a gentle comic novel about two middle-aged unmarried sisters called Belinda and Harriet (based on imaginary older versions of herself and her sister Hilary) happily living together in a pre-war English country village and darning socks for the local clergy. Some Tame Gazelle was eventually published in 1950, when Pym was almost 37; by then she had wisely omitted the Nazi references of earlier drafts, and sensible, tweedy Belinda now pins a seed-pearl brooch to her dress instead of a miniature swastika. 

Her second novel, Excellent Women, was published in 1952 and many still consider it to be Barbara Pym’s masterpiece. Based on her own experience of life as a single woman in austere post-war London, where she worked as an editorial assistant at the International African Institute and rented a flat with her sister Hilary, it is narrated by Mildred Lathbury, who works for the ‘Society for the Care of Aged Gentlewomen’. Like the Pym sisters, she lives in rooms ‘without every convenience’ in Pimlico:

‘“I have to share a bathroom,” I had so often murmured, almost with shame, as if I personally had been found unworthy of a bathroom of my own.’

Mildred’s matter-of-fact acceptance of her lot in life (including a shared bathroom) is a riposte to Virginia Woolf’s call for women writers to have a room of their own. One of the many ‘splendid’ British women who remained unmarried after the war, Mildred is taken for granted by the other characters in the novel but never loses her ironic good spirits, sorting out their marital problems for them as efficiently as she organises the church jumble sale. 

Excellent Women was described by the poet John Betjeman in 1952 as ‘a perfect book’, and other critics agreed. ‘We needn’t bring Jane Austen into it,’ wrote the News Chronicle approvingly, ‘but Miss Pym is writing in a great tradition and knows it.’ During the 1950s and early 1960s a new Pym novel appeared every two years or so, including A Glass of Blessings (1958) and No Fond Return Of Love (1961), all well reviewed.

An aspiring young poet Philip Larkin even wrote her a fan letter in 1961, and this was the beginning of a warm epistolary friendship that would last for the rest of Pym’s life. Although Larkin was an atheist and Pym a devout Anglican, they shared a love of what others dismissed as ‘commonplace’ and the many letters they exchanged for almost twenty-five years are funny and charming. 

‘We needn’t bring Jane Austen into it, but Miss Pym is writing in a great tradition and knows it.’