Barbara Pym HomePage

The index of Barbara Pym writings is online, thanks to Hazel Bell

Archives of the old Fans Meeting Point

 

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, the 2nd of June 1913, from Frederic Crampton Pym, solicitor, and Irena Spenser Thomas. She studied at the Huyton College, in Liverpool, and readed English at the St. Hilda's College in Oxford (B.A. "with honors"). During II World War she worked for Censorship (as Mildred does in Excellent Women) then served in the Women's Royal Naval Service, in Britain and in Naples. From 1946 to 1974 she worked at the International African Institute where she was assistant editor of the anthropological journal Africa.

 

Her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, was published in 1950, followed by five more books. In 1963 the new chief editor of her publisher rejected An Unsuitable Attachment, because, as he wrote, "in present conditions we could not sell a sufficient number of copies to cover costs". In 1969 she sent The Sweet Dove Died, written in 1968, to many publishers, with no success. Discouraged, she stopped writing.

 

In 1974, Barbara Pym retired from the Institute relocating with her sister Hilary (and a cat named Minerva) in Finstock, Oxfordshire. But in 1977 she gets her revenge. The Times Literary Supplement asks to some eminent literates a list of the "most underrated novelist of the century". Barbara Pym is the only one to be mentioned twice, by poet Philip Larkin and by Lord David Cecil. In a forthnight, Pym is established as a major novelist. Her new novel, Quartet in Autumn, is readily accepted and she will be able to publish two more books before her death.

 

Barbara Pym dies of cancer the 11th of January 1980.

the BP pages are developed and maintained by Claudia Di Giorgio