Abstract
“What a good thing there is no marriage or giving in marriage in the after-life,” remarks Jane Cleveland in Jane and Prudence (1953); “it will certainly help to smooth things out” (p. 214). The war of the sexes goes on continually in Barbara Pym’s novels, with men apparently winning it at some moments, women at others. “As an anthropologist,” Rupert Stonebird in An Unsuitable Attachment (1982) knows “that men and women may observe each other as warily as wild animals hidden in long grass” (opening paragraph, p. 13).
Perhaps the time will come when one may be permitted to do research into the lives of ordinary people.
— No Fond Return of Love
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Notes
Barbara Brothers, “Women Victimized by Fiction,” in Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, ed. Thomas F. Staley (London, 1982), pp. 69 and 71.
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© 1988 John Halperin
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Halperin, J. (1988). Barbara Pym and the War of the Sexes. In: Jane Austen’s Lovers and Other Studies in Fiction and History from Austen to le Carré. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19332-5_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19332-5_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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