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Reassessing Barbara Pym: An Introduction

THE centenary of Barbara Pym’s birth was in 2013. While it was marked with special conferences by the Barbara Pym Societies of Britain and North America, Nick Turner and Frances White, the editors of this issue, decided that Pym was not being given enough literary celebration outside this. Barbara Pym, we felt and continue to feel, is a novelist who, as well as bringing enormous pleasure to many readers over the years, needs to be taken seriously as an artist. With this in mind, we organized an international centenary conference at the University of Central Lancashire in July 2013. This prompted a call for papers and subsequently led to this publication, which we hope will augment and expand existing Pym scholarship. Barbara Pym was born in 1913 in Oswestry, Shropshire, England. After reading English at the University of Oxford, she later joined the Wrens during the Second World War, and then worked for many years as the assistant editor of the anthropological journal Africa. Pym lived in London until retiring with her sister to the village of Finstock in Oxfordshire. She died in 1980. These biographical facts form the background to her fiction. The six novels published between 1950 and 1961 were generally well reviewed and very popular with readers. These are: Some Tame Gazelle (1950), Excellent Women (1952), Jane and Prudence (1953), Less Than Angels (1955), A Glass of Blessings (1958) and No Fond Return of Love (1961). An Unsuitable Attachment was, however, summarily rejected by her publisher, Jonathan Cape, in 1963, and, seen as being out of temper with the climate of the time, her work remained unpublished until 1977. Then, in the Times Literary Supplement, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both chose her as their contribution to a list of under-appreciated w N I C K T U R N E R A N D F R A N C E S W H I T E .