I had a book in mind to review for Valentine’s Day, but was hesitant to reveal the choice to my mentor and fellow reviewer Jeff Minick. Would it fit h.
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.
An unsuitable attachment to Nazism: Barbara Pym in the 1930s spectator.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from spectator.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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.
Barbara Pym’s secret sexual awakening
The great English novelist spun comic gold from her spinsterhood, but as a student she was wild – until a fling took a disturbing turn Some moments of rapture : Barbara Pym pictured in the 1930s
Credit: The Barbara Pym Society
Mention the name of the novelist Barbara Pym and the image conjured up is of a middle-aged spinster gossiping about the curate over a cup of tea in a rainy village, with a cat on her knee. A comforting, very English world. But the image belies the reality of a life of adventure and resilience that she subtly wove into the fabric of her novels.