One of the best satirists and comic novelists of the twentieth-century, Barbara Pym was born in willow Street, Oswestry in 1918. her work has been likened to that of Jane Austen, for both writers focused on the absurdities and confusions arising in the everyday life of genteel people. Her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle was published in 1950, and was followed by many others, including Excellent Women in 1952 and Jane and Prudence in 1953.
Morda Lodge with its plaque
Barbara Pym at work
In 1977 her novel, Quartet in Autumn, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The poet Philip Larkin was a great admirer of her novels and they became friends after he praised her work in the Times Literary Supplement in 1977.
A blue plaque indicating the birthplace Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym lived in Oswestry during her childhood and following her student years at Oxford. Her family settled in a substantial Edwardian house, Morda Lodge, at what was then the edge of the town. The house still stands and has a plaque stating that it was once the home of Barbara Pym.
The Pym family worshipped at Oswestry's parish church, St Oswald's, and Barbara remained an Anglican all her life, representing in many of her novels the foibles of the clergy and gently poking fun at life in a small closely-knit community centred on the church.
St Oswald's Church, Oswestry
As a child and teenager Barbara Pym wrote stories, poems and plays. She was brought up in a lively, fun-loving family. She and her sister Hilary walked and cycled in and around Oswestry and were involved fully in the local community; as well as church activities, they visited the cinema a couple of times a week, did a lot of reading, played musical instruments and sang (her parents were central figures in the Oswestry Operatic Society), visited friends, and were keen dressmakers and knitters. From this outwardly ordinary life in a small Shropshire town Barbara Pym observed everything and gained an abundance of ideas for her writing. When she went to St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1931, she soon decided that she wanted a career as a writer.
Pym's first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, was begun at Oxford, although it was published several years later in 1950 after considerable rewriting. Some Tame Gazelle is based on how the young Barbara imagined she, her sister and her Oxford friends would be in their fifties, and it is very funny indeed. Published by Jonathan Cape, it was a great success and Pym continued to write and publish novels throughout the 1950s, including the marvellous Excellent Women (1952), set in Pimlico, and Jane and Prudence (1953) which moves between office life and the world of church meetings. In the 1960s, however, her brand of satire and humour based on life among genteel people, went out of fashion. For years Barbara Pym could not find a publisher for her novels; however, her books were very popular with users of public libraries and she retained a loyal body of readers who were keen on her work. Philip Larkin's praise of Pym's novels - in the TLS he (along with the critic Lord David Cecil) proclaimed her to be the most underrated writer of the twentieth century - led to publishers showing an interest in the work they had previously dismissed as old-fashioned. Barbara Pym's rather dark novel, Quartet in Autumn, being short-listed for the 1977 Booker Prize helped to put her work on the literary map. Radio interview and a television documentary followed, as well as televised adaptations of her work.
Like Jane Austen, Barbara Pym received a number of proposals of marriage, but chose to stay single rather than marry without falling in love. Some Tame Gazelle was prophetic, for Barbara did end up in middle age living with her sister Hilary (just as Jane Austen chose to live with her sister, Cassandra). Unlike Austen, Pym had a very active life, living briefly in Germany in the 1930s, travelling through Europe, joining the WRNS during World War II and having a career for many years at the International African Institute, London. After retirement, she and Hilary shared a cottage in Oxfordshire.
Barbara Pym lived at Morda Lodge in Oswestry at the outbreak of World War II, and in her journal she captured the strange juxtaposition of local details and international conflict which must have been part of many people's lives at this time:
10 June 1940: It rained and thundered after tea and a 6 we knew that Mussolini had declared war on us. Poor Italy!
14 June 1940: Fine strawberries from the garden. The Germans are in Paris.
20 June 1940: Still no news of the [French] peace terms. The country is lovely, honeysuckle in the hedges. How dare the Nazis think they could invade it!
[from Hazel Holt, A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (Macmillan, 1990), pp. 99-100]
Barbara Pym wrote sixteen novels and all are well worth reading. if you are unfamiliar with her work, I would certainly recommend starting with her first novels, Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women and Jane and Prudence, which encapsulates so much of Pym's style and humour. I would also recommend Hazel Holt's biography, A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (Macmillan, 1990), which has informed my short account of this key Shropshire author.
Professor Deborah Wynne
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