Barbara Pym

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym (2 June 1913 – 11 January 1980) was an English novelist.

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was born on 2 June 1913 at 72 Willow Street in Oswestry, Shropshire, the elder daughter of Irena Spenser, née Thomas (1886–1945) and Frederic Crampton Pym (1879–1966), a solicitor.

She was educated at Queen's Park School, a girls' school in Oswestry.

From the age of 12, she attended Huyton College, near Liverpool.

Pym's parents were active in the local Oswestry operatic society, and she was encouraged to write and be creative from a young age.

She spent most of her childhood at Morda Lodge in Morda Road, Oswestry, where in 1922 she staged her first play, The Magic Diamond, performed by family and friends.

In the 1930s, she travelled to Germany on several occasions, developing a love for the country as well as a romantic relationship with a young Nazi officer, Friedbert Gluck.

Although she initially admired Hitler and did not foresee the advent of war, she later recognised her "blind spot", and removed a character based on Gluck from the novel she was in the process of writing.

In 1931, she went to St Hilda's College, Oxford, to study English.

While at Oxford, she developed a close friendship with the future novelist and literary critic Robert Liddell who would read her early works and provide key feedback.

She took a second-class honours B.A. degree in English Language and Literature in 1934.

Pym wrote her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, in 1935, but it was rejected by numerous publishers including Jonathan Cape and Gollancz.

She wrote another novel, Civil to Strangers, in 1936 and several novellas in the following years, which were collectively published as Civil to Strangers after Pym's death.

In early 1939, Pym approached Jonathan Cape about a job in publishing; none was available at the time.

In 1940, Pym wrote the novel Crampton Hodnet, which would also be published after her death.

The outbreak of World War II changed her plans, and in 1941 she went to work for the Censorship Department in Bristol, later joining the Women's Royal Naval Service.

In 1942 she had a brief relationship with the BBC radio producer Gordon Glover, who was the estranged husband of her friend Honor Wyatt.

From 1943, she served in naval postal censorship, eventually being posted to Naples.

In June 1946, Pym started work at the International African Institute in London.

Pym's sister Hilary separated from her husband in 1946, and the two sisters moved together into a flat in Pimlico.

They would later move to a house in Queen's Park.

Pym did not marry or have children, despite several close relationships with men.

In her undergraduate days, they included Henry Harvey (a fellow Oxford student, who remained the love of her life) and Rupert Gleadow.

When she was 24 she had a romance with the future politician Julian Amery, six years her junior.

In the 1950s she published a series of social comedies, of which the best known are Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958).

After some years of submitting stories to women's magazines, Pym heavily revised Some Tame Gazelle, which this time was accepted by Jonathan Cape for publication in 1950.

The poet Philip Larkin regarded Some Tame Gazelle as Pym's Pride and Prejudice.

The novel follows the lives of two middle-aged spinster sisters in an English village before the War, who are both given the possibility of love.

That year, Pym also had a radio play – Something to Remember – accepted by the BBC.

Pym's second novel, Excellent Women (1952), was well received, but her third, Jane and Prudence (1953), received more mixed reviews.

Her fourth novel, Less than Angels (1955), had poorer sales than the previous three, but it attracted enough attention to be Pym's debut novel in the United States.

A representative from Twentieth Century Fox came to England with an interest in securing the film rights, but this ultimately fell through.

Pym's fifth novel, A Glass of Blessings (1958), was poorly reviewed, Pym noting that – of her first six novels – it was the worst reviewed.

However, the inclusion of sympathetic homosexual characters, in an era when homosexuality was largely frowned upon, and homosexual acts between men were illegal, attracted some interest in contemporary reviews, including The Daily Telegraph.

Pym's sixth novel was No Fond Return of Love (1961), in which two female academic research assistants fall in love with the same man.

She became the assistant editor of the scholarly journal Africa, where she would work until her retirement in 1974.

That inspired her use of anthropologists as characters in some of her novels, notably Excellent Women, Less than Angels, and An Unsuitable Attachment.

Glover broke this off abruptly, which traumatised Pym, and when Glover died in 1975 she burnt her diary for 1942.

In 1977 her career was revived when the critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin both nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century.

Her novel Quartet in Autumn (1977) was nominated for the Booker Prize that year, and she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.