A month ago I came across an article in New Yorker called When Barbara Pym Couldn’t Get Published [1]. Barbara Pym was a novelist of some modest success. She had published six books 1950-1961 before her editor dropped her quite suddenly in 1963. She had become old-fashioned. According to the article, Pym’s world is ..less a realm of hope and glory than one of modesty and mild deprivation. The “boiled chicken smothered in white sauce” that’s served to the new curate provides the same nutritional […]

Barbara Pym is a writer who, strangely, is best known for being underrated. She published a number of books in the 1950s and 1960s, then fell out of fashion. She made a comeback in the late 1970s when both the literary critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin nominated her when asked by the Times Literary Supplement to name the most underrated writer of the 20th century. A Few Green Leaves was Pym’s final book, published shortly after her death in 1980. Pym […]

This is the first Barbara Pym novel from 1950. And it feels like both a first novel and a first Barbara Pym novel. At some point in English literature (and this is true about American literature as well in its own particular ways), there’s a shift in books, especially pastoral town books (Jane Austen, Arnold Bennett, George Eliot, some Waugh etc, Miss Marple) from books where going to church (especially regular old Church of England church) goes from a part of and sometimes topic within […]