By Diane White, Globe Columnist, 4/3/2000

It was a moment both touching and funny - ''rich material,'' Pym might have described it. It came near the start of the second annual meeting of the Barbara Pym Society of North America, after Myers, choirmaster and organist at St. Anselm's Abbey in Washington, D.C., had spoken about Victorian hymns in the author's novels.

Ellen Miller, director of publications at Harvard Law School, started the American group as an adjunct to the British society based at Pym's college, St. Hilda's, Oxford. Scholars and fans came to this year's conference from all over the United States and Canada, from Britain and Austria. There were many returnees and new faces, too, some of them encouragingly young. An official Web site (www.spore.it/

pym/homeenglish.htm) has stirred interest. The publisher Moyer Bell is reissuing her novels. She is the subject of academic research. Miller and Frauke Lenckos are coeditors of a collection of essays, ''Reading Barbara Pym,'' for which they hope to find a publisher.

Pym, who died in 1980, had more than her share of problems with publishers during her lifetime. Her novels still remain relatively unknown, which is a shame. She wrote with subtle irony about human nature, its infinite capacity to irritate and bore, to delight and surprise. Her readers talk about ''Barbara Pym moments'' in their own lives, situations that remind them of passages in the novels.

Katherine Ackley, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, noted that Pym wrote about single women in a way that had never been done before. Her work isn't exactly ''Bridget Jones's Diary,'' but some of her themes are similar, notably ''the impossibility of men,'' as one of Pym's characters puts it.

Ackley spoke about the importance of literature in Pym's novels. Her characters are forever reading, quoting, or misquoting favorite lines from books and poems, being influenced by what they read. Pym's novels and diaries, Ackley said, suggest that literature has enormous power to give comfort, help people connect with one another, liberate the spirit, and ultimately make readers more compassionate human beings.

As her readers know, Pym herself was comforted, inspired, and entertained by many writers, notably Jane Austen, Henry James, and various greater and lesser English poets. Nancy Ellen Talburt, associate vice chancellor and professor of English at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, revealed that Pym also liked the mysteries of Dorothy Sayers and Josephine Tey, and the work of American writer Alison Lurie.

Talburt wrote a fan letter to Pym that led to a lunch with the author at an Oxford hotel in 1979. As the only person at the conference who had met Pym, Talburt was questioned intently after her talk. What did Pym drink? Gin and tonic. What did she wear? A white cotton blouse and a bright blue skirt. Did she talk about her friend Philip Larkin, the poet? Only to say that having a conversation with him was frustrating because he was both shy and rather deaf, ''a difficult combination.''