Barbara Pym

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Standard Name: Pym, Barbara
Birth Name: Barbara Mary Crampton Pym
Pseudonym: Tom Crampton
Self-constructed Name: Sandra
BP was a distinguished, understatedly comic novelist of the twentieth century, whose autobiographical writings (diaries, letters, and notebooks) were published only after her death.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. Barbara Pym: A Critical Biography. University of Missouri Press.
1-2, 9
Pym, Barbara. “Editorial Materials”. A Very Private Eye, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym, Macmillan, p. various pages.
xiii-xiv
Having achieved moderate success during her early career and then fallen out of favour, she was dramatically rediscovered and re-evaluated only three years before her death. Since then her stock has been high, despite a touch of condescension evidenced in her being seen as a miniaturist and novelist of manners, and likened to Jane Austen . She is also related to such contemporaries as Ivy Compton-Burnett (her senior) and Margaret Drabble and Penelope Lively (her juniors). Her fiction focusses on middle-class, unmarried women constrained to live on the margins of society. It is unfailingly sensitive to the more ludicrous aspects of gender conventions. Lively argues that what is going on is not tart observation of social manoeuvrings but a devastating, sublimely unfair, wonderfully funny and ultimately fatalistic analysis of the relations between men and women.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Travel Elizabeth Taylor
Several more visits to Greece followed from (beginning with one in 1959), on which she travelled by herself.
Beauman, Nicola. The Other Elizabeth Taylor. Persephone Books.
305
In May 1961 she was in Athens, Paros, and the Peloponnesus. The following year...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Penelope Fitzgerald
It includes Fitzgerald's comments on works by Jane Austen , George Eliot , Margaret Oliphant , Barbara Pym , Carol Shields , and Amy Tan , as well as on a number of recent literary...
Textual Features Anita Brookner
The novels have been said to owe more to the French tradition than to the English—though French critics have read her as belonging to an English women's tradition, while English reviewers have cited most frequently...
Reception Anita Brookner
Among other evaluations, Olga Kenyon admired AB 's capacity to represent the interiority and social frustrations of gifted undervalued women:
Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Macmillan.
2
women with twentieth-century awareness of their problems, which however are problems unchanged since...
Reception Eliza Cook
The Old Arm-Chair held its popularity for so long as almost to attain the status of folk literature. Barbara Pym quoted a couplet from it in 1943.
Pym, Barbara. A Very Private Eye. Editors Holt, Hazel and Hilary Pym, Macmillan.
138
Reception Elizabeth Taylor
Although she received some glowing reviews throughout her career from some of the most distinguished of her novelistic peers, ET has also been damned with faint praise. She has been called both the modern man's...
Reception Penelope Fitzgerald
Biographer Hermione Lee announcing in early April 2010 that she was working on PF , with access to her papers, and, best of all, her library of books with their many personal annotations.
Lee, Hermione. “From the Margins: Hermione Lee on Penelope Fitzgerald”. The Guardian, pp. Review 1 - 3.
1
These...
Publishing Philip Larkin
During the later 1950s PL reviewed poetry for the then Manchester Guardian, and during the next decade he reviewed jazz for the Daily Telegraph. He occasionally wrote for the periodical press about other...
Publishing Winifred Peck
House-Bound, first published in 1942, was re-issued by Persephone Books in 2007, with an introduction by the late Penelope Fitzgerald , WP 's niece and fellow novelist. The edition had been planned for almost...
Publishing Lady Cynthia Asquith
In her final decade she returned to journalism in the form of book reviewing: she gave a warm welcome, for instance, to Barbara Pym 's Jane and Prudence.
Beauman, Nicola. Cynthia Asquith. Hamish Hamilton.
325
Author summary Elizabeth Jolley
EJ , writing in the later twentieth century, was called the most comical and disturbing writer working in Australia today.
Bird, Delys, and Brenda Walker, editors. Elizabeth Jolley: New Critical Essays. Angus and Robertson.
back-cover
The author of some fifteen novels as well as plays, poetry, and short stories...
Literary responses Penelope Mortimer
Reviews were positively reverential. The Spectator called PM[o]ne of our most outstanding contemporary novelists,The Listener credited her with suave virtuosity, and the Times Literary Supplement called this novel brilliantly planned, taut, intelligent...
Literary responses Naomi Royde-Smith
The Times Literary Supplement called a beautifully produced miniature of a novel, marred only by too great rarefaction.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
1402 (13 December 1928): 986
Barbara Pym , reading The Lover in July 1943, in the context...
Literary responses E. J. Scovell
After this appeared, Poetry Review applied to EJS another phrase which has been quoted more than once in discussions of her work: probably the best neglected poet in the country. The same article suggested that...
Literary responses Margaret Drabble
The British Book News review likened this book, as a state-of-the-nation novel, to Dickens 's Hard Times. The review concluded: If this is not one of Margaret Drabble's best-balanced books, it presents a powerful...

Timeline

8 May 2008: Virago Press marked thirty years of Virago...

Women writers item

8 May 2008

Virago Press marked thirty years of Virago Modern Classics by re-issuing works by Barbara Pym , E. M. Delafield , Elizabeth Taylor , Jacqueline Susann , Muriel Spark , Helene Hanff , Zora Neale Hurston , and Angela Carter .

Texts

Pym, Barbara. A Few Green Leaves. Macmillan, 1980.
Pym, Barbara. A Glass of Blessings. Jonathan Cape, 1958.
Pym, Barbara. A Very Private Eye. Editors Holt, Hazel and Hilary Pym, Macmillan, 1984.
Pym, Barbara. An Academic Question. Macmillan, 1986.
Pym, Barbara. An Unsuitable Attachment. Macmillan, 1982.
Pym, Barbara. Civil to Strangers and Other Writings. Macmillan, 1987.
Pym, Barbara. Crampton Hodnet. Macmillan, 1985.
Pym, Barbara. “Editorial Materials”. A Very Private Eye, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym, Macmillan, 1984, p. various pages.
Pym, Barbara. Excellent Women. Jonathan Cape, 1952.
Pym, Barbara. Jane and Prudence. Jonathan Cape, 1953.
Pym, Barbara. Less Than Angels. Jonathan Cape, 1955.
Pym, Barbara. No Fond Return of Love. Jonathan Cape, 1961.
Pym, Barbara. Quartet in Autumn. Macmillan, 1977.
Pym, Barbara. Some Tame Gazelle. Jonathan Cape, 1950.
Pym, Barbara. Some Tame Gazelle. Jonathan Cape, 1978.
Pym, Barbara. The Sweet Dove Died. Macmillan, 1978.