Barbara Pym

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym (2 June 1913 – 11 January 1980) was an English novelist. In the 1950s, she published a series of social comedies, of which the best known are Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958). After a period of rejection by publishers, her career was revived in 1977 when the critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin nominated her as the most underrated writer of the previous 75 years. Her novel Quartet in Autumn (1977) was nominated for the Booker Prize that year, and she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Biography

Early life

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was born on 2 June 1913 at 72 Willow Street in Oswestry, Shropshire, the elder daughter of Irena Spenser, née Thomas (1886–1945) and Frederic Crampton Pym (1879–1966), a solicitor. She was educated at Queen's Park School, a girls' school in Oswestry. From the age of 12, she attended Huyton College, near Liverpool. Pym's parents were active in the local Oswestry operatic society, and she was encouraged to write and be creative from an early age. She spent most of her childhood at Morda Lodge in Morda Road, Oswestry, where in 1922 she staged her first play, The Magic Diamond, performed by family and friends.

In 1931 she went to St Hilda's College, Oxford, to study English. There she developed a close friendship with the future novelist and literary critic Robert Liddell, who would read her early works and provide key feedback. She took a second-class BA honours degree in English in 1934. In the 1930s she visited Germany several times, developing a love for the country, and a romantic relationship with a young Nazi officer, Friedbert Gluck. She initially admired Hitler, and did not foresee the advent of war, but she later recognised her "blind spot", and removed a character based on Gluck from the novel she was writing.

In early 1939, Pym approached Jonathan Cape about a job in publishing; none was available at the time. The outbreak of World War II changed her plans, and in 1941 she went to work for the Censorship Department in Bristol, initially checking letters between Irish families in Britain and Ireland. Later, she joined the Women's Royal Naval Service. From 1943 she served in naval postal censorship in Southampton, and was subsequently posted to Naples. She had learned about coded messages while an examiner, and may have worked for or with MI5.

Personal life

In June 1946, Pym started work at the International African Institute in London. She became the assistant editor of the scholarly journal Africa, and continued in this role until her retirement in 1974. That inspired her use of anthropologists as characters in some of her novels, notably Excellent Women, Less than Angels and An Unsuitable Attachment. Pym's sister Hilary separated from her husband in 1946, and the two sisters moved into a flat in Pimlico. Later they moved to a house in Queen's Park.

Pym did not marry or have children, but had several close relationships with men. In her undergraduate days, they included Henry Harvey (a fellow Oxford student, who remained the love of her life) and Rupert Gleadow. When she was 24 she had a romance with the future politician Julian Amery, six years her junior. In 1942 she had a brief relationship with the BBC radio producer Gordon Glover, who was the estranged husband of her friend Honor Wyatt. Glover broke this off abruptly, which deeply upset Pym, and when Glover died in 1975 she burnt her diary for 1942.

Early literary career

Pym wrote her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, in 1935, but it was rejected by numerous publishers, including Jonathan Cape and Gollancz. She wrote another novel, Civil to Strangers, in 1936, and several novellas in the following years, which were published as Civil to Strangers after Pym's death. In 1940, Pym wrote the novel Crampton Hodnet, which was also published after her death.

After some years of submitting stories to women's magazines, Pym heavily revised Some Tame Gazelle, which this time was accepted by Jonathan Cape, and published in 1950. The poet Philip Larkin described Some Tame Gazelle as Pym's Pride and Prejudice. The novel follows the lives of two middle-aged spinster sisters in an English village before the War, who in the course of the narrative are both given offers of marriage but turn them down in favour of their settled life. That year, Pym also had a radio play – Something to Remember – accepted by the BBC.

Pym's second novel, Excellent Women (1952), was well received, but her third, Jane and Prudence (1953), received more mixed reviews. Her fourth novel, Less than Angels (1955), had poorer sales than the previous three, but it attracted enough attention to be Pym's debut novel in the United States. A representative from Twentieth Century Fox came to England with an interest in securing the film rights, but this fell through.

Pym's fifth novel, A Glass of Blessings (1958), was poorly reviewed. Pym noted that – of her first six novels – it was the worst reviewed. However, the inclusion of sympathetic homosexual characters, in an era when homosexuality was largely frowned upon, and homosexual acts between men were illegal, attracted some interest in contemporary reviews, including The Daily Telegraph. Pym's sixth novel was No Fond Return of Love (1961), in which two women engaged in editorial work fall in love with the same man. The book continued the trend of Pym's novels receiving minimal critical attention. Nonetheless, it was positively reviewed in Tatler, the reviewer commenting:

I love and admire Miss Pym's pussycat wit and profoundly unsoppy kindliness, and we may leave the deeply peculiar, face-saving, gently tormented English middle classes safely in her hands.When Pym made a less than flattering allusion to a Marks and Spencer's dress in her work, the company's legal department was sufficiently concerned by her influence to write to her.