It is impossible to write about the English novelist Barbara Pym without lapsing into a Pym-ish voice, part prim-and-proper middle England spinster, part caustic-tongued critic of social norms.
Pym was often compared to her literary hero, Jane Austen, whose home she visited in 1969, writing in her diary, “I put my hand down on Jane’s desk and bring it up covered in dust. Oh that some of her genius might rub off on me.” I suspect it did. Pym is Austen with a side of jumble sales, public transport and tinned meat, plus a plethora of dry one-liners which will leave you chortling out loud. (I’ve yet to LOL at Jane Austen but perhaps 2026 might be the year).
At first glance both writers present as romantics, obsessed with pairing off single women and the related fripperies: the frocks and shoes, the social gatherings, the gossip – though neither would stoop to call it gossip – regarding men in possession of decent fortunes and men lumbered with shady pasts. Therein lay my initial disinterest. I’m not a big fan of relationship novels. Contemporary or set in the past, they’re much of a muchness, often following a well-worn path. The meet cute. The coy preamble to hooking up. The revelation of an insurmountable problem: a previous marriage, gambling debts or, in Pym’s case, female protagonists consistently falling for gay men. Thereafter, the removal of all hindering blocks so the couple can live happily ever after, playing smug matchmakers to their single pals.
[ Happy birthday, Jane Austen: 250 years of undermining the romantic novelOpens in new window ]
So far, so Austen. Not so much Pym, whose novels resist the romance-by-numbers mould. Like Austen, her writing is also a bold interrogation of class and gender, Englishness, privilege and family. Unlike Austen, Pym’s heroines are often still single at the novel’s close, finding their purpose in work, familial responsibility and friendship, rather than the love of a man. “It seemed as If I might be going to have what Helena called ‘a full life’ after all,” claims Mildred, a little unenthusiastically, at the close of Excellent Women.
READ MORE
There’s a similar tinge of disappointment running through many of Pym’s books. For all their attempts to portray women achieving excellence, autonomy and independence, there’s usually a sense that these women are a little lonely in their bedsits, attempting to find sustenance in hard-boiled eggs and High Anglicanism. Given the chance they would probably prefer marriage and a lifetime of domesticity. They would say they wouldn’t, but they would. Pym wrote just after the second world war, when a shortage of marriageable men meant spinsterhood was the only option for a whole generation of women.
In light of this, you would think she would place marriage on a pedestal, and yet I found her portraits of domestic bliss somewhat heavy on the domestic, notably light on the bliss. In the intriguingly titled Crampton Hodnet, a bored Oxford don embarks upon a lacklustre affair with a younger woman that runs out of steam before they make it to Paris for their dirty weekend. In An Unsuitable Attachment, vicar’s wife Sophia Ainger pays more attention to her cat than her husband. In Sophia’s defence, Mark is dishwater dull and Faustina’s quite some cat.
Marriage in Pym is often portrayed as a war of attrition: passionless, repetitive and inherently rooted in the domestic. There are more accounts of wives darning socks than ardent embraces of a sexual nature or professions of enduring love.
In short, the grass is always greener in Barbara Pym. Despite all attempts to console themselves with career and routine, women are constantly seeking companionship, while those in long-term relationships lament the stifling nature of monogamy. In her later works, Pym is increasingly bipartisan. The single men in Quartet in Autumn are just as frustrated as the single ladies. The reader looking for high romance might not find what they’re after in Pym. But I adore her dour, unflinching portraits of women doing their level best not to lose any part of themselves. They reek of real life, mostly Pym’s own.
Born in Shropshire in 1913, to upper middle-class parents, Pym studied at Oxford between the world wars. If her voluminous diaries are to be believed, she fell in love frequently and with little discernment from late adolescence all the way through to middle age. Pym had the uncanny knack of favouring “an unsuitable attachment” over the more appropriate men who propositioned her. She developed feelings for openly gay men, married men and abusive men. In the period leading up to the second World War she even embarked upon a relationship with a young SS officer and sported a swastika badge.
I recognised myself in Pym’s characters. I’ve an excellent woman inside me too
Invariably all these relationships fizzled out. Her singleness was an ongoing source of frustration and grief. I found both Paula Byrne’s recent biography, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, and Pym’s own autobiography in diaries and letters, A Very Private Eye, helpful, but also discombobulating. It was hard to reconcile my idea of Pym as champion of the forthright and autonomous fictional woman with these snapshots of a young, and not-so-young, woman, whose happiness consistently hinged on male approval.
Pym’s other great obsession was literature. She was a prolific reader and early writer, completing her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, aged 21. It took some time to find a home at Cape, which published five of her novels during the 1950s. After No Fond Return of Love appeared in 1961, Cape deemed her writing unfashionable, and Pym entered her wilderness years. During the 1960s and 1970s she displayed remarkable resilience, continuing to write despite rejection after rejection. She took a job in the International African Institute and roomed with her beloved sister, a money-saving but companionable arrangement mirroring the set-up portrayed in Some Tame Gazelle.
In 1977, her friend, and long-term correspondent, Philip Larkin, writing in the TLS, recommended Pym as one of the century’s most underrated novelists. Thereafter she enjoyed a late renaissance, publishing three further novels, including, in my opinion, her strongest work, Quartet in Autumn, which was shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize.
Pym died of cancer in January 1980. She was 67 years old and, despite ill health, still writing and nurturing ideas for new books. If men were Pym’s great disappointment, then words were her sustenance and joy. A diary from the mid-1930s records the following confession. I “must work at my novel, that is the only thing there is and the only way to find any happiness at present ...”
I came to Pym on the recommendation of a good friend with whom I share a love of acerbic female writers such as Nancy Mitford, Barbara Comyns and Muriel Spark. My first Pym was Excellent Women and I was instantly hooked. For a virgin reader, it’s the perfect starter Pym, containing all her favourite themes and foibles, plus a delightfully passive-aggressive account of flat-sharing that feels bang up to date.
For the past seven years I’ve been reading a writer‘s complete works in chronological order across a year. In 2025 I chose Barbara Pym and she’s been my most popular choice so far. Strangers all over the world read along with me, sharing their thoughts on social media, waxing lyrical about her enduring appeal. It’s hard to summarise why Pym’s work is worth revisiting. In 2025 I read 13 of her books (some unpublished), and the writing, while sublime in places, is occasionally thin and repetitive. The settings are dated and the scenarios heavily reliant on the mores of a bygone time. And yet, there are many aspects of her writing that I found both utterly intoxicating and acutely relevant.
Pym stuck to her guns throughout her career, circling round the same sweet tropes, finding endless new perspectives on church and village life. She paid close attention to a small field of reference, weaving the epic into her explorations of the quotidian. She frequently drew upon lived experience, peppering her novels with fictional versions of her friends and acquaintances and drawing upon her experiences in the International African Institute. Some Tame Gazelle was an uncannily prescient imagining of how Pym and her sister would pass their later years.
As a writer, who often revisits themes and character types, I found her consistency heartening. Halfway through my reading year, I was tempted to draw up a bingo card, ticking off Pym tropes as they appeared. This would certainly have included a single curate, new to the parish, an eccentric social anthropologist, a jumble sale or church fete, a middle-aged spinster and a character with a delightfully silly name (Everard Bone being my personal favourite, swiftly followed by Wilmet Forsyth of A Glass of Blessings fame).
If anything, though, it’s Pym’s women who’ve stayed with me. They’re frequently flawed, occasionally unhinged, and dependable despite themselves. They’d love to be odd, exotic and flighty but somebody has to do the church flowers and ensure there’s cauliflower cheese for tea. In short, Pym’s women are women we all recognise and she writes them with incomparable warmth, wit and candour. In bringing my latest novel, Few and Far Between, to life, I kept returning to Barbara Pym. She provided me with a blueprint for characters who are trying to be excellent despite extenuating circumstances. Furthermore, I recognised myself in Pym’s characters. I’ve an excellent woman inside me too. Mine’s stoic, flawed and frequently miffed by how life has turned out. Some days she does my head in. On other days, like Barbara Pym, I pick up my pen and let her roar.
Jan Carson’s latest novel, Few and Far Between, is published by Doubleday on April 9th
