The courage to be unfashionable : Barbara Pym in 1979
Credit: Mark Gerson Photography/Bridgeman
“If only someone would have the courage to be unfashionable,” wrote Barbara Pym to the poet Philip Larkin in 1969. At this point Pym, who had made her name with several spry chronicles of middle-class life, with its weak and watery curates and hesitant spinsters, was deeply unfashionable herself. She had been dropped by her publisher, and was contemplating a late middle age in obscurity, dutifully bound to an abstruse-sounding job at the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. Eight years later, she enjoyed an annus mirabilis, which included a Booker nomination. Since her death from cancer in 1980, her stock has continued to rise, and she is now considered one of Britain’s greatest postwar novelists. Comparisons to Austen are not unreasonable.
by Paula Byrne (William Collins £25, 686pp)
Had Miss Marple been a novelist, she’d have been Barbara Pym. Both possessed a beady-eye for vicars wearing bicycle clips and enjoyed a glass of sherry.
Nothing was more exciting than ‘knitting a green jumper’, purchasing a bedspread, attending the parish jumble sale, sewing stockings for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force or hearing the bells announce Evensong on a misty autumn night.
Pym was also a shameless snoop. Jilted by future MP Julian Amery, she concealed herself outside his house in Belgravia, peering through the window at him. But she kept watch on her neighbours and perfect strangers, too, compiling what her biographer Paula Byrne calls ‘an exhaustive log of their comings and goings’. One person she even stalked to a private hotel in the West Country.