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.
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.