Cats, curates and cardigans

Anyone who has ever listened to the thump of a rejected manuscript descending cheerlessly on to the mat can take comfort from the roller-coaster career of Barbara Pym. Between 1950 and 1961 Miss Pym (1913–1980) had published six modestly successful novels with the firm of Jonathan Cape. Then, on 24 March 1963 — ‘a sobering fourth Sunday in Lent’, as Ann Allestree is careful to remind us — came a bolt from the skies, in the shape of a letter from Cape’s editorial director, Wren Howard, turning down the seventh with the age-old publisher’s bromide that ‘in present conditions we could not sell a sufficient number of copies to cover costs’.

There seems little doubt that this throwing over was the great trauma of Pym’s life, far more upsetting to her than the various relationships that punctuated her half-century of wistful spinsterdom, and a kind of King Charles’s Head to which she infallibly reverted in conversations with dinner guests or letters to literary chums. A vilely coloured milk jelly was even christened ‘Maschler Pudding’ in tribute to the Cape editor who had inspired Wren to pull the plug. Friends rallied round — Philip Larkin wrote personally to his own sponsor, Charles Monteith — but it took a top billing in the famous 1977 TLS symposium on underrated talent to bring her books back into print and secure a Booker short-listing for Quartet in Autumn.

For all her sympathy, Allestree is careful not to exaggerate the sense of a sacrificial lamb served up on the altar of changing 1960s taste. Certainly the Age of Aquarius was a difficult era for the genteel lady novelist: A Shake of the Dice (2014), the latest volume of David Kynaston’s post-war history, prints a selection of the increasingly injurious reviews dished out to Pym’s contemporary Elizabeth Taylor, who found herself damned not for lack of accomplishment but, in an egalitarian age, for being too middle-class.