As much as I love buying a new book, the chance to “shop my bookshelves” often provides equal joy!
Recently a new biography of the British novelist Barbara Pym (1913-1980) prompted me to reread several of her delightful novels.
Pym’s popularity even in her own lifetime waxed and waned, although now she is well established as a stylish “niche” writer of social comedies.
Pym’s novels often revolve around the local parish–the jumble sales, the endless cups of tea, the Women’s Institute– and depict the modest “daily round of trivial things.”
Pym heroines are sensible, virtuous, independent women – “excellent women” –she calls them. The men—somewhat less excellent.
Her novels are most often compared to Jane Austen, a writer she deeply admired.
Pym published six novels between 1950 and 1961, before she was abruptly dropped by her longtime publisher. After sixteen years, she was “rediscovered” and published three more novels before her death, including a Booker Prize nominee.
Only two of her novels are still in print in the U.S., Excellent Women and The Booker Prize nominee, Quartet in Autumn, but many of her books are available second hand or in the U.K. A list of her published work is attached.
All of Pym’s novels are “excellent,” but those published after the “wilderness years,” as she called the period when she was unpublishable, are slightly more melancholy.
If you haven’t read Pym, I suggest starting with Excellent Women. Reviews of all of her books can be found on the website of the Barbara Pym Society
Unless you are intimately acquainted with Pym’s work, I don’t recommend Paula Byrne’s wonderful biography, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, as familiarity with her work adds immeasurably to its enjoyment.
If you are a Pym fan, the biography is fascinating and fun!