This biography proves barbara pym was a 20th-century jane austen

Ben Lawrence 18 April 2021 5:00pm BST “If only someone would have the courage to be unfashionable,” wrote Barbara Pym to the poet Philip Larkin in 1969. At this point Pym, who had made her

name with several spry chronicles of middle-class life, with its weak and watery curates and hesitant spinsters, was deeply unfashionable herself. She had been dropped by her publisher, and

was contemplating a late middle age in obscurity, dutifully bound to an abstruse-sounding job at the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. Eight years later, she enjoyed

an annus mirabilis, which included a Booker nomination. Since her death from cancer in 1980, her stock has continued to rise, and she is now considered one of Britain’s greatest postwar

novelists. Comparisons to Austen are not unreasonable. Those of us who adore her wise, socially piquant novels with their peculiarly English sense of failure such as A Glass of Blessings and

Some Tame Gazelle are inclined to imagine her life to be similar to that of her characters; darning socks or fretting over the chicken fricassée on an eternal autumn Saturday. Like Mildred

in Excellent Women, we think Pym expects “so little of herself that it is almost sad”. Paula Byrne’s new book confirms that Pym had a racier existence (at least until her mid-30s). We are

told of the happy, confident child of a Shropshire solicitor who gets into Oxford, where dashing male undergraduates beat a path to her door. Amid some fairly heavy-handed analysis of Pym’s

emotional character, the incidental detail is hilarious. With one early crush, Rupert Gleadow (“the best kiss on record”), we hear how he takes a bath while she sits in the airing cupboard

reciting Dryden. The novelist created a headache for the ardent biographer, tearing up passages of her diary which were too painful (or perhaps too shocking) to be preserved. She also

invented alter egos, such as the elegant Pymska, when the mood took her. One feels the real Pym tried on different personalities like new hats, and a certain amount of jejune faddiness

accounts for some of the more shocking passages, where Pym, obsessed with Hitler, travels to 1930s Germany and starts mooning over Nazis. If you adore the sound judgment implicit in her

fiction, you might baulk at such moments. But the second half of the book sees Byrne gain a tighter control of her subject, and Pym elicits much greater sympathy. Disappointment,

particularly of the romantic kind, seems to calcify, and little nuggets such as the sight of Pym feeling mousy next to the novelist Mary Renault, who is bedecked in gold lamé, are both

hilarious and heartbreaking. Still, there are gaps. Pym, we are told, got on very well with all sorts of women, but the female friendships mentioned (particularly with her sister Hilary) are

frustratingly shadowy. While Byrne is occasionally opaque about biographical detail, she is beautifully savvy about her subject’s fiction. As biography, then, The Adventures of Miss Barbara

Pym sometimes falls short of expectation, but as a manifesto for her genius, it is gloriously persuasive. THE ADVENTURES OF MISS BARBARA PYM IS PUBLISHED BY WILLIAM COLLINS AT £25. TO ORDER

YOUR COPY FOR £19.99, CALL 0844 871 1514 OR VISIT THE TELEGRAPH BOOKSHOP