Barbara Pym Society 1999 Annual Meeting

Sept. 4-5, 1999

St. Hilda’s College

Meeting Report from Green Leaves

On Saturday morning the Annual General meeting was held. In the afternoon Dr Lyndall Gordon, Senior Research Fellow of St Hilda’s, introduced Professor John Bayley, Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, to speak on the topic chosen for this conference, Quartet in Autumn. He said that he had recommended Jane and Prudence to Lord David Cecil, who was then his tutor, as Lord David had asked him what he had read recently and this was all he could think of. Bayley felt he had made a dreadful gaffe, as it wasn’t a very intellectual choice, but later Lord David told him that he had now read it too, and thought it was very good! So perhaps we owe the whole Pym revival to John Bayley. He told us how he and Iris Murdoch, his wife, had met Barbara, and how Barbara was rather tall and Iris rather small, so that Barbara had written in her diary that she had towered over Iris, ‘but only in height’. He added that it was interesting to see ‘these two great novelists together’. He thought work and sex boring to read about in novels, and that this was why Pym featured them little—personally he preferred to read about food, especially tea!

After tea, appropriately, an open session discussion of the novel was held, in which John Bayley took part with great involvement. Following a reception and dinner, Lesley Grant-Adamson told us how, as a journalist, she had endeavoured to publicize Pym’s work and to get it re-published, and how the famous votes in Pym’s favour of Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin had turned the tide to enable these things.

Barbara Everett, Senior Research Fellow of Somerville College, spoke on Quartet on Sunday morning, comparing it with Pym’s other ‘dark novel’, as she called them both, The Sweet Dove Died. There were dramatized readings from Quartet by professional actors on Sunday afternoon. Emma Jane Kirby attended for ‘Woman’s Hour’, the radio programme, interviewing several members during lunch and attending the discussion session.Ellen Miller and Beverley Bell took photographs.