Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Barbara Pym
-
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, 1992.
1-2, 9
Pym, Barbara. “Editorial Materials”. A Very Private Eye, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym, Macmillan, 1984, 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, 1990.
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, 1991.
back-cover
The author of some fifteen novels as well as plays, poetry, and short stories...
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.
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
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...
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
Anita Brookner
Among other evaluations, Olga Kenyon
admired AB
's capacity to represent the interiority and social frustrations of gifted undervalued women:
qtd. in
Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Macmillan, 1992.
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, 1984.
138
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, 3 Apr. 2010, pp. Review 1 - 3.
1
These...
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...
