Barbara Pym

Categories: Staff Picks , Fiction

There are certain authors whose works seem so exactly observant that you can imagine them as anthropologists studying these strange creatures, human beings, and making field notes. 

Barbara Pym, who wrote in England in the 1950s and (after a break of being considered old-fashioned and unpublishable) in the late 1970s and 1980s, is one of them.  Her astringently fond satires of a certain segment of English society make me smile with their perceptive sharpness.

Which makes it all the more appropriate that some of her characters actually are anthropologists.  Rather vague, scholarly types caught up in footnotes and interdepartmental warfare, but still, anthropologists.  The rest of her characters are what she would (and does) call Excellent Women, those indispensable women, spinsters or clergymen's daughters, who make the tea for church fetes and staff the charity booths in jumble sales.

Excellent Women is in fact my favorite of her works.  Its narrator is Mildred Lathbury, precisely one of those mild, intelligent women who are allotted the role of index maker or tea brewer instead of any more exciting career or identity.  She becomes caught up in the life of her rather more dashing neighbor, Helena Napier, and that of some possibly suitable (though not always interesting) men. 

Think Jane Austen, but a little darker.   There's the same sense of a circumscribed society and all of its minute but overridingly important expectations and routines.  Unlike some of Austen's bolder heroines, though, Mildred is fully aware that she is on the sidelines of life, not the heroine of the romance.  Still, though she acknowledges her loneliness and marginality, she also sees the small pleasures of solitude. 

You'll find yourself bingeing once you start.  And you'll be delighted to find that Pym is one of those authors who can't resist bringing back her characters, including Mildred, in later novels.