A singular voice

Barbara Pym, now thought of as a reliable and popular novelist of the 1950s and 1960s, has almost disappeared from sight, overshadowed by the more explicit and confessional writers we are accustomed to reading today. Indeed her eclipse was sudden and unforeseen: her mature novels were rejected by three major publishers when she was only midway through her career, and it was only through the generous comments of two of her admirers, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil in the Times Literary Supplement in 1977, that she was brought again to public attention.

That her admirers in this instance were men rather than women was a more than welcome reversal of her perceived appeal to a public composed mainly of readers much like herself: domestic ironists of no great ambition but some accomplishment, with a perceptible debt to Jane Austen. It comes as something of a surprise to learn that the writer who initially inspired her was Aldous Huxley, yet there was always a steely reserve there and also an effortless style which ensured a loyal readership willing, or indeed happy, to overlook the somewhat limited boundaries of her fictional world: few worldly intrusions, many clerics, and above all a good-natured assumption of virtue.

When she died in 1980 she was easily relegated to the past, yet she was no sheltered spinster; she worked in an office until she retired and voiced no complaints about the differing demands of her inner and outer lives. She seems to have been a confident and contented woman, with a steady belief in her own ability. She never married, and is easily dismissed as unworldly, but this is a false assumption. She has the same emotional register as her more sophisticated contemporaries, surpassing them in matters of tact and modesty, qualities now almost extinct both on and off the page.