How Pleasant to Know Miss Pym

Abstract

Between 1950 and 1961 Barbara Pym published six novels. All enjoyed a mild success with reviewers and the public. But for nine years now no book by this writer has appeared, and the time seems suitable for a provisional assessment of her small but consistent body of work. Never commanding much attention, her books are becoming lost to sight amid the constant press of new novels of an outlook and genre very different from her own. Yet she has her enthusiasts, who each week read the reviews in the hope of finding that ‘a new Barbara Pym’ has been published and wonder who on earth can be brought to buy and read the often alarming and ill-mannered fiction of the present day. To these enthusiasts Barbara Pym has been a provider of the very best sort of ‘books for a bad day’. This is to give a great deal of praise, but perhaps not quite enough.