An insightful, most enjoyable, appreciative compilation of essays in three sections: as the Preface explains, ‘the [four] essays in Part I consider Barbara Pym’s life; those [eleven] in Part II evaluate her novels’ and those [four] in Part III ‘discuss her human and artistic achievement’. The writers are John Bayley (‘Where, exactly, is the Pym world?’), Hazel Holt (‘The novelist in the field: 1946-74’), Philip Larkin (‘The rejection of Barbara Pym’), Robert Liddell (‘A success story’), A. L. Rowse (‘Miss Pym and Miss Austen’), and 14 more.
Muriel Schulz draws a detailed and fascinating comparison between the novelist’s methods and records and those of the anthropologist, both involving research into people. Lotus Snow’s ‘Literary Allusions in the Novels’, of which Hazel Holt wrote (in her obituary of Lotus Snow in Green Leaves Nov. 2000), ‘it must always be required reading for all Pym scholars’, is reprinted here. Snow identifies all the many quotations and allusions in the novels, drawing conclusions as to Pym’s ‘range of knowledge and her preferences among the English poets and novelists’, finding that ‘More Victorian than Romantic poets are alluded to in the novels’, and ‘Pym’s characters are not passionate devotees of the novel as they are of poetry’.
The volume has lost none of its validity, or its appeal to Pym devotees, in the fourteen years since its publication. ( )