The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

I’m reading so slowly lately. It wasn’t that long ago that I plowed through a book, sometimes two books, in a week. Now I’m lucky to finish a book in two weeks. And it’s not because I’m so busy that I’m reading slowly. I’m just distracted. I can’t concentrate. All of this (gesturing wildly at everything) is a lot. But I did finally finish the book that I’ve been reading for the last two weeks: Paula Byrne’s The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, a literary biography of one of my very favorite authors. 

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I’m not sure why England in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s is such a calming alternative to the present. Things were a lot in pre-war and wartime and postwar Britain, too. Maybe it’s because I know now that everything turned out OK; whereas I have no idea if things will turn out OK here in the United States in 2025. It’s an evolving story. It’s a fluid situation, as they say on the news. 

Also, I’m on the fence about literary biographies. I’m not sure it’s fair to an author to dig through her personal diaries and papers and then try to connect events in her life to events in her books. Or rather, it’s absolutely 100 percent fair because everything that’s in writing is discoverable - especially if the writer published it. And it’s also a reasonably accurate way to examine an author’s life. Most of Pym’s characters were based on herself and her friends, to varying degrees. That’s true of most fictional characters. We can only imagine so much. 

Muriel Spark, another of my favorite 20th century British authors, wrote a memoir called Curriculum Vitae. I read Muriel Spark for the first time when I was young - I found old hardcover copies of Memento Mori and The Girls of Slender Means at Lame Duck Books, a used bookstore in Philadelphia, and then I made a point of reading everything she wrote. I bought Curriculum Vitae the moment it was published in 1992, and read it in a day, and was then astonished to learn that critical reviews were mixed because critics felt that Spark was vague and selective in recounting the events of her life. Duh! Of course she was vague. Of course she was selective. We all tell others what we want them to know. 

So my objection to literary biographies (not that it stops me reading them obvs) has nothing to do with fairness or accuracy - it’s just that I don’t always get the point of writing about writers, period. I’d rather let them speak for themselves. 

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But back to Barbara Pym and her adventures.  BLUF: Barbara Pym was an interesting person who lived a rather complicated life. Something I never knew about Miss Pym (and would have preferred not to know) is that as a young woman, she was briefly infatuated with early Nazi Germany. She wasn’t the only one, of course; and unlike Diana and Unity Mitford, she soon saw the truth about the Nazis. Still, this was a shocking lapse in moral clarity for a writer with so much understanding of history and human nature. 

Barbara Pym was also unlucky in love, falling for one unsuitable man after another. She allowed men to treat her badly, and she was  a bit of a stalker. But she was intensely curious about other people in general, not just men with whom she was obsessed. What sometimes crossed the line into stalking often just started as people-watching. 

*****

Characters in the Pym novels set in the immediate postwar years through the early 1950s were preoccupied with economy; and so was Barbara Pym herself. Everything was in short supply, especially food and clothing; and housing was very scarce in London and the other cities where so many buildings had been damaged or reduced to rubble in the bombing raids. Pym and her sister, Hilary, both Oxford-educated upper middle class women who worked full-time (Barbara Pym had a job with an academic institute in addition to her writing, which made very little money during her lifetime), still had to borrow furniture for their first flat in London, and also had to be careful with their everyday expenditures on everything from clothing and food to electricity and heat. Pym’s diaries often mention prices and economizing measures. 

*****

Barbara Pym’s work fell out of favor during the late 50s and 60s, and after publishing six novels, she went a long time without publishing anything. And then just when she thought her career was over, she was back in fashion almost instantly following the appearance of a now-famous Times Literary Supplement issue dedicated to the most overrated and most underrated 20th century British authors. Pym was the only author to be mentioned twice as underrated - by Lord David Cecil and by Philip Larkin. Almost overnight, Barbara Pym was in demand again, with reissues of her previously published books and new interest in publishing previously rejected manuscripts. She won awards and was inducted into prestigious literary societies and appeared on TV and radio programs and was generally the toast of the English-speaking literary world. 

*****

Barbara Pym died of cancer in 1978. Her diaries and literary papers are held in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, where the young Barbara Pym read and wrote and studied and flirted and cried when she was a St. Hilda’s College undergraduate in the 1930s. She was one of the greatest English language novelists of the 20th century - because, and not in spite of her focus on the lives of ordinary women. Read Byrne’s biography of Pym, by all means - it’s very good writing about a really interesting person - but read her novels first. There are at least three Barbara Pym novels that I haven’t gotten to yet, and I intend to remedy this forthwith.