Serpents in suburbia

Barbara Pym was never just a cosy writer. She could be barbed and sour — and seriously, hilariously funny. Kate Saunders, in her introduction to Pym’s last novel, explains how

‘Rather to my surprise,’ Barbara Pym wrote to her friend Philip Larkin in 1971, ‘I have nearly finished the first draft of another novel about a provincial university told by the youngish wife of a lecturer. It was supposed to be a sort of Margaret Drabble effort, but of course it hasn’t turned out like that at all.’

The novel was An Academic Question — witty, sharp, light as a syllabub, nothing like anything by Margaret Drabble and with a cast of typically Pym-like English eccentrics. There is Kitty Jeffreys, who commanded an army of servants on a Caribbean island until the locals unfeelingly elected an all-black government and forced her into exile. Her son, Coco, is a fastidious bachelor with a passion for gossip; her sister, Dolly, runs a ramshackle secondhand bookshop and obsessively tends hedgehogs.

And these are just the minor characters. In the foreground are the narrator, Caro Grimstone, and her ambitious anthropologist husband, Alan. Caro has a four-year-old daughter and a Swedish au pair, and is longing to find a proper role for herself before the boredom drives her crazy. Other academic wives are ‘helpmeets’ who type or index their husband’s publications and are thanked in the acknowledgments, but Alan does his own typing and is secretive about his work — and he spends a worrying amount of time with his glamorous colleague, Iris Horniblow.

An Academic Question may not be archetypal Pym (no clergymen or ‘drearily splendid’ spinsters), but it couldn’t have been written by anyone else. The freshness, wit and general good nature of this book are all the more remarkable because Pym wrote it without any real hope of getting it published, right in the middle of her 15 years in literary outer darkness.