Barbara Pym

So glad to see this appreciation of Barbara Pym. I think she’s still sadly underrated.

From The Image Update, newsletter of Image

A staff recommendation from Lauren F. Winner, Creative Nonfiction Editor

How I love Mildred Lathbury. She is the “unmarried woman just over thirty” who narrates Barbara Pym’s second novel, Excellent Women (1952), which I’ve just read for the eighth time. Set in postwar London, Excellent Women follows Mildred as she gets drawn into the marital contretemps of her neighbors, and into the renegotiation her priest must undertake when he falls in love with a local widow. The critic Robert J. Graham has written, “All Pym novels are concerned with variations on a single theme: Life as a succession of large and small privations.” Yes, and therein lies one of the deep pleasures of reading Pym: her capacity to show those privations, but also the small, fleeting, but nonetheless real pleasures people find alongside lack.

The contingency of Pym’s career is a favorite story: her first six novels were published to warm appreciation but modest sales, and then her publisher turned down her seventh. It was 1963. Stories of excellent women living out their days in Anglican parishes were out of fashion. (Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters was on the New York Times bestseller list that year, as was The Group.) Well over a decade elapsed with no new Pym novel in the stores. Then, in 1977, the Times Literary Supplement asked a variety of writers to identify the most underrated books of the last seventy-five years. Barbara Pym was the only person identified by two different contributors (Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil) as the century’s most underrated writer—and that distinction unleashed a Pym renaissance. Before her death in 1980, Pym published Quartet in Autumn, The Sweet Dove Died, and A Few Green Leaves. Several more novels came out posthumously. A happy ending, but when that seventh novel was turned down, Pym might have been one of her own characters: “To receive a bitter blow on an early spring evening (such as that Cape don’t want to publish An Unsuitable Attachment—but it might be that someone doesn’t love you anymore)—is it worse than on an autumn or winter evening? Smell of bonfire (the burning of rose prunings etc.), a last hyacinth in the house, forsythia about to burst, a black and white cat on the sofa, a small fire burning in the grate, books and Sunday papers and the remains of tea.”

Excellent Women is very much a novel of England’s 1940s austerity. But it is also a novel of the world as it still is, perhaps of the world as it always has been—and reading Pym requires me to consider the vulnerabilities of my own world, which I prefer, of course, not to entertain. We discussed the book recently at my church book club. One of the participants said, early on, that he wouldn’t want to marry Mildred, because she was too perceptive. Near the end of the evening, the same man said he wouldn’t want to be Mildred, either: for all her perspicacity, she was too unappreciative of herself, saying too often that she was plain, that she was insignificant. I found myself moved by this comment, and not generically moved, but specifically moved to pray for Mildred. I’ve never before wanted to pray for a fictional character.

I first read Excellent Women when I was twenty-six; I had heard of it as a novel with a protagonist who was an unmarried woman, and it was literally the only novel I knew of which that could be said. I read it, baldly, as a model, and closed the book feeling despair. Almost twenty years later, I am both less in quest of a map and more appreciative of the hints of direction Mildred and Pym might provide. About Pym, John Bayley wrote “each time we read her, she seems more real.” She makes the world, my world, seem more real, too.

—Lauren F. Winner, Nonfiction Editor