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Searching... Salem Main Library | Pym, B. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
'.an incisive and wry portrait of life in an Engish village in Oxfordshire.'
Author Notes
Novelist Barbara Pym was born in Shropshire and educated at Oxford University. An editor of Africa, an anthropological review, for many years, she published her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, in 1950. Since then, a number of popular works have been published. Often compared with the works of Jane Austen in both manner and subject, Pym's novels are apparently guileless evocations of the foibles of aging and isolated characters. She has a sure, if understated, sense of her characters' psychology and of their unintentionally comic revelations about themselves and their futile lives. After the publication of No Fond Return of Love (1961), all her books were out of print until she was cited, coincidentally by both David Cecil and Philip Larkin, as among the most underestimated novelists of the 20th century. She subsequently completed two successful novels, The Sweet Dove Died (1978) and Quartet in Autumn (1978), the latter a comic-pathetic study of two men and two women in their sixties who work in the same office but lead separate, lonely lives outside. Many of her earlier books have since been reprinted, including Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958), both perceptive psychological studies of aging women taken advantage of by others. A posthumous novel, A Few Green Leaves (1980), is a superb comedy of provincial village life.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
Pym's last novel--she died in January 1980--returns to the English-village/ Anglican-church ambience of her early, recently-resurrected successes (Excellent Women, A Glass of Blessings). . . as anthropologist Emma Howick, an un-pretty spinster nearing 40, spends a year or so in her professor mother's cottage in a wee hamlet near Oxford. And through the months of creakingly traditional small occasions--church flower-arranging, bus outings, teas, lunches, jumble sales--Emma meets a generally sad, very Pym-esque assortment of neighbors: minister-widower Tom, who lives for local history; his housekeeping spinster sister Daphne, who lives for her Greece vacations; old Dr. G., who prescribes buying a new hat for most ills; young Dr. Shrubsole and wife, who covet the spacious rectory; trendy bachelor restaurant-reviewer Adam, whose purchases of tight jeans are often unfortunate. True, some changes do occur as time goes by: illness, death, visits; Daphne moves out to live with a friend (diary-keeping Tom wonders: ""What was he to write about the events of this morning? 'My sister Daphne made a gooseberry tart and told me that she was going to live on the outskirts of Birmingham'? Could that possibly be of interest to readers of the next century?""); an old academic flame of Emma's moves into a nearby forest cottage and toys with her affections and her kitchen (she's forever carrying casseroles into the woods); Emma then finds herself drawn to the rector--""Would he, for example, be capable of cleaning her top windows, which was what she really needed?""--and ends up with rather unconvincing optimism, looking forward to ""a love affair which need not necessarily be an unhappy one."" But if Emma is an only half-sketched heroine, there's real, modest achievement here--in the accumulation of tiny, touching, ironic observations and reflections: the ways that lonely lives revolve around food (""the packet of savoury rice, the ever-useful fish fingers. . .""); a woman who's unnerved by winning a bottle of red wine in a lottery (""so dark and menacing""); a church florist who loses his faith after seeing those ""talks on the telly"" (a reverend ""wearing a green turtle-neck jumper--I ask you!""). With neither the smiling, sharp edges of the early work nor the perfectly controlled pathos of Quartet in Autumn (1978), this is minor Pym--really just a neutral-toned catchall of her acute angles on loneliness and the ravages of time-marching-on--but readers with the appropriate expectations will find it quietly exact, gently amusing, and (except for that dubious happy ending) genteel-ly heartbreaking. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.