The World of Barbara Pym

Abstract

‘Male and female created He them’, thinks Tom Dagnall, the rector who is a central figure (heroes simply do not occur in a Pym novel) in A Few Green Leaves, observing neighbours through their window (p. 29). And that proposition is the crux of the story, as it is of the whole of Barbara Pym’s work. Tom, widower — and, incidentally, the only clergyman in the oeuvre to receive relatively charitable authorial treatment (one thinks almost with nostalgia of Archdeacon Hoccleve) — and living with his sister, who walks out on him halfway through the book, is, like all Pym men, in search of feminine services of various kinds: culinary chiefly, parochial of course, and vaguely scholarly in connection with Tom’s consuming interest, local history. ‘A meek woman of retirement age could be of inestimable value’, he thinks (p. 60), taking stock of a new arrival in the village — and we are right into familiar Pym country, the battle is on, restrained, structured, but a battle none the less. And if it were any other Pym novel we could be fairly certain that by the end the men would probably have won, at least in a technical sense of either having graciously given themselves in marriage, or, more probably, cunningly extracted themselves from emotional obligation.