Barbara Pym
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was a distinguished, understatedly comic novelist of the twentieth century, whose autobiographical writings (diaries, letters, and notebooks) were published only after her death. 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
. She is also related to such contemporaries as
(her senior) and
and
(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.
- BirthName: Barbara Mary Crampton Pym
- Self-constructed: SandraTo reflect the more dashing aspects of her character,used the name Sandra at . Her friend and biographer suggests that she may have been inspired by the comparative exoticism of either Cassandra or Alexandra.
- Pseudonym: Tom Cramptontried unsuccessfully to publish her novel The Sweet Dove Died under the pseudonym Tom Crampton during the late 1960s, when publishers refused to accept her work.Thomas was the name of her great-grandfather . He and his wife brought up 's father as their own son, although he was in fact the illegitimate son of their daughter. Because they kept his illegitimacy a secret, Barbara always thought Thomas Pym was her grandfather. Crampton, her middle name, was also the middle name of her father and her sister .