Barbara pym biography autobiography lesson
Paula Byrne&#;s recent biography of Barbara Pym provided some surprises for those who imagined her as a demure church going spinster. She was shown to have desperate crushes on ambivalent men, who then sometimes ended up as characters in her fiction. I am saving this biography for the end of the year holiday when I can read it at my leisure. In the meantime, I am revisiting some of her fiction, to remind myself what it is about her writing that saw her dropped by Jonathan Cape in the &#;s only to rise in popularity again ten years later.
A Glass of Blessings was published in and it signals the beginning of our current era. Characters who are male models, a character who works in a coffee bar, another who has a motor scooter. And male characters who are gay, although this is always implied rather than stated directly. We have the usual Barbara Pym topics. A very High Church of England parish, as High as it can be without actually being Roman Catholic, where Father Thames hears Confession and has difficulty in getting curates and housekeepers. We have the elderly Miss Prideaux who still wears a hat in the house, &#;a little black toque to which a bunch of artificial violets had beenpinned at a rather rakish angle&#; and her friend Sir Denbigh. But our main character, Wilmet Forsyth, is a youngish married woman.
Wilmet is married to Rodney a civil servant, but in her hey-day she was in the Wrens in Italy. Here she met Rodney who was an officer in the Army, and her best friend Rowena met her husband Harry, another Army officer.
We spent some time reminiscing about our time in Italy &#; long evening drives in curious army vehicles with now forgotten names, the headlights picking out an urn or a coat of arms on the gateway of some villa, or illuminating a crowd of people in the square of the little town &#; the rococo dining-rooms of a particular officers&#; club where the Asti Spumanto was warm and flat, and there were too many drunken majors&#;remem Pym’s novels rarely identify an exact year; they are more heavily textured with place than with time. Broad references to postwar “austerity” or the “welfare state” do most of the work of creating a period. “A Few Green Leaves,” set in the nineteen-seventies (and published in , the year of Pym’s death), doesn’t feel terribly different from stories she set in the thirties and fifties. Seasonal cycles persist in importance over the clanging progression of historical eras; the daily trumps the dramatic. In “No Fond Return of Love,” from —the last of Pym’s novels before her banishment from publication—Dulcie, who works as an indexer from her home in suburban London, notes, “People blame one for dwelling on trivialities, but life is made up of them. And if we’ve had one great sorrow or one great love, then who shall blame us if we only want the trivial things?” Religion, not faith, is central to Pym’s Britain, and it feels both essential and irrelevant. The parish is perpetually shrinking, its congregants forever aging beneath the Victorian Gothic steeple. The church’s rituals don’t set souls aloft; they keep communicants tethered to the earthly round. The bodies buried in the churchyard never seem gone to Heaven or Hell; they just seem dead. Evensong, contemplative and resigned, provides the real recurring music of Pym’s world, however fewer ears may be inclining toward it. We learn from “A Glass of Blessings” () that Father Bode now “does a great deal of visiting in the afternoons. . . . If he does it in the evenings he finds that people are looking at the television and don’t like to be interrupted.” The novels’ humor is so sly that a reader sometimes gets halfway into a new sentence before starting to laugh at the one before. In “Jane and Prudence,” Prudence recalls “other houses where Jane and Nicholas had lived and the peculiar kind of desolation they seemed to create around them.” Given the smallness of the action, there is something mock-heroic about the com I decided to be a completist and read ALL the Barbara Pym. I&#;m typically not a stickler for reading an author&#;s diaries, letters, or miscellany (except for Jane Austen&#;that woman had a vicious streak in her, and I love every minute of it), but I felt like Pym would be an entertaining correspondent. I was not wrong. A Very Private Eye is a compiled collection of Pym&#;s letters, diaries from , and other notebook excerpts that featured ideas for her novels. We read about her college years, friendships that lasted a lifetime, failed loves and love affairs, ideas that turned into novels, and the cultural climate in which she lived (particularly World War II). A huge chunk of Pym&#;s life was spent attempting to get published&#;after an initial burst of success with her first six novels, publishers continually declined her, saying that the public didn&#;t want to read her kind of novel. Her breast cancer diagnosis and mastectomy in set the stage for a decline in health that would lead to her death in Yet these last ten years of her life brought a new burst of productivity. Two contributors to the Times Literary Supplement cited her as one of the most under-rated authors of the twentieth century, leading to a renaissance in publication and a Booker prize nomination for Quartet in Autumn. The last months of her life were spent in pain from a resurgence in her cancer, but she furiously worked on getting her last submitted novel (A Few Green Leaves) ready for publication. Her writing is hilarious, witty, and heartbreaking. The last portion shows darkness creeping into her life, even as she tried to maintain productive writing habits and get herself published somehow. It&#;s clear that Pym valued her novels and characters immensely. As a reader, I feel connected to her through this deep interest in writing and in people, and I am so glad the Barbara Pym experiment of was a success. I just have her collection The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym Author:Paula Byrne ISBN Publisher:William Collins Guideline Price:£25 There can be few literary comebacks more satisfying than that of Barbara Pym. In the s and early s she published six novels, stories about ordinary women, often single, books that revel in the minutiae of everyday middle class life. They are the sort of books that could appear – and sometimes have appeared, thanks to the ill-judged covers and blurbs Pym’s work has sported over the years – to be dreary, cosy or both. Yet as anyone who has read them knows, those novels are anything but dreary or cosy. They are sharply funny, insightful, moving and highly entertaining. In , Pym submitted her seventh novel to her publisher Jonathan Cape. To her shock and dismay, it was rejected as being too uncommercial. Other publishers rejected it too. Pym, who had a day job as an editor, was determined to keep writing fiction – and indeed she kept writing novels for more than a decade, despite failing to find a publisher for any of them. She was told, bluntly and repeatedly, that her sort of fiction didn’t sell anymore. Then in , when she was in her mids, a miracle happened. The Times Literary Supplement ran a big piece on the most underrated and overrated writers of the 20th century. Among the many suggestions of underrated writers, only one name appeared twice. That name was Barbara Pym, who was championed by Lord David Cecil, the distinguished academic and literary critic, and the poet Philip Larkin. Pym’s fortunes changed overnight. She was interviewed on radio, in print and on television. Her latest novel Quartet in Autumn was snapped up by Macmillan (deliciously, when Jonathan Cape wrote and said they would love to publish it, she was able to tell them they had already rejected it and now she had a new publisher). It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. READ MORE Like An intimate glimpse at the life of Barbara Pym
The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym: An exemplary biography
Personal papers