ADVENTURES OF MISS BARBARA EB

Paula Byrne

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780008322205
• eBook ISBN: 9780008322229
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

'Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously' JILLY COOPER

Picked as a Book to Look Forward to in 2021 by the Guardian, The Times and the Observer

A Radio 4 Book of the Week, April 2021

Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of the late twentieth century, revealing the inner workings of domestic life so brilliantly that her friend Philip Larkin announced her the era's own Jane Austen. But who was Barbara Pym and why was the life of this English writer – one of the greatest chroniclers of the human heart – so defined by rejection, both in her writing and in love?

Pym lived through extraordinary times. She attended Oxford in the thirties when women were the minority. She spent time in Nazi Germany, falling for a man who was close to Hitler. She made a career on the Home Front as a single working girl in London's bedsit land. Through all of this, she wrote. Diaries, notes, letters, stories and more than a dozen novels – which as Byrne shows more often than not reflected the themes of Pym's own experience: worlds of spinster sisters and academics in unrequited love, of powerful intimacies that pulled together seemingly humble lives.

Paula Byrne's new biography is the first to make full use of Barbara Pym's archive. Brimming with new extracts from Pym's diaries, letters and novels, this book is a joyous introduction to a woman who was herself the very best of company.

Byrne brings Barbara Pym back to centre stage as one of the great English novelists: a generous, shrewdly perceptive writer and a brave woman, who only in the last years of her life was suddenly, resoundingly recognised for her genius.

Notes

This book is based primarily on the Archive of Barbara Mary Crampton Pym (1913–80), novelist, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS. Pym 1–178. For the sake of chronological clarity, letters, notebooks and diary entries are cited by date, not manuscript number, but a manuscript number is given for the first citation of each source. Specific page numbers within draft novels are not given. To avoid cluttering the text with reference note markers, only one note is given in passages where there are several quotations from the same source. A detailed listing of the contents of the archive is online at https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/3235/collection_organization.

The following abbreviations are used in the Notes:

The novels of Barbara Pym:

AGB – A Glass of Blessings (1958)

AQ – An Academic Question (written 1970–72; published posthumously, 1986)

CH – Crampton Hodnet (completed 1940; published posthumously, 1985)

CS – Civil to Strangers and Other Writings, short stories and extracts from unpublished novels, edited posthumously by Hazel Holt (1987)

EW – Excellent Women (1952)

FGL – A Few Green Leaves (1980)

JAP – Jane and Prudence (1953)

LTA – Less Than Angels (1955)

NFRL – No Fond Return of Love (1961)

QIA – Quartet in Autumn (1977)

SDD – The Sweet Dove Died (1978)

STG – Some Tame Gazelle (1950)

UA – An Unsuitable Attachment (rejected 1963; published posthumously, 1982)

Where possible, quotations give page references to the readily accessible Virago Modern Classics paperback editions.

Other abbreviations:

ALTA – Hazel Holt, A Lot To Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (1990)

AVPE – Barbara Pym, A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters, posthumously selected and edited from her papers by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym (1984)

BP – Barbara Pym

EH – Elsie Harvey

HH – Henry Harvey

JA – Julian Amery

PL – Philip Larkin

RG – Rupert Gleadow

RL – Robert ‘Jock’ Liddell

RR – Richard Roberts (‘Skipper’)

RS – Robert Smith (‘Bob’)

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prologue: In which Miss Barbara Pym pays a Visit to Jane Austen’s Cottage
• Book the First: A Shropshire lass
• Book the Second: Germany
• Book the Third: War
• Book the Fourth: From the Coppice to Naples
• Book the Fifth: Miss Pym in Pimlico
• Book the Sixth: The wilderness years
• Book the Seventh: In which the fortunes of Miss Pym are reversed
• Epilogue: In which Mr Larkin attends the Funeral of his Much-Loved Correspondent Miss Barbara Pym
• Afterword
• Picture Section
• Notes
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• About the Publisher