Different Pigeons

"They've moved me to a new office and I don't like it at all. Different pigeons come to the window"

(from 'Excellent Women')

A quiet, neat elegance

What did Barbara Pym look like? Here is how the daughter of two of her friends remembers her:

"She was tall, like at least one of her heroines - Mildred, in Excellent Women - with mid-brown hair and bright, noticing eyes. I think she had a tendency to lean forward slightly from the waist, perhaps because she was tall, perhaps because she spent so much of her time at a desk either at work or while writing. Her figure I remember as trim, neither thin or fat. Cardigans, blouses and skirts are what I recall her wearing: not particularly fashionable but with a quiet, neat elegance. 'Well turned out' is perhaps the most appropriate phrase. What I particularly remember about Barbara was an air of watchfulness as if behind that quiet, unobtrusive facade a formidable intelligence was observing, taking notes, analysing, distilling. This was what set Barbara apart from my parents' other friends and made her so memorable."

(This passage is taken from an article on B.P. which appeared in the February 1996 edition of Contemporary Review)

 

Barbara Pym and the anthropologists

Mildred, the protagonist of Excellent Women, meets "her first anthropologists" at a conference at a "Learned Society" and ends up finding herself with the honour and duty of looking after proofs and indices for one of them. In Jane and Prudence we discover that she ends up marrying him. ("Who has she married?" asked Miss Morrow. "An anthropophagist," declared Miss Dogget in an authoritative tone. "He does some kind of scientific work, I believe"). Miss Clovis, the anthropological society's feminist secretary is unforgettable, and she returns in A Few Green Leaves the protagonist, Emma Howick, is an anthropologist who looks at life in a quiet English village through the eyes of an anthropologist, and considers writing articles about local behaviour. Amongst the characters of An Unsuitable Attachment, Rupert Stonebird, as an anthropologist, knows that "men and women may observe each other as warily as wild animals hidden in long grass". There are also many "floating anthropologists", such as Professor Apfelbaum, who pops up in several novels.

 

Handsome but indifferent...

The original version of many of the male characters in Pym's novels who avoid romantic attachments with the "excellent woman" of the week was called Henry Harvey, and died in 1995. They met when they were both students at Oxford; Harvey went to teach in Helsinki, where he married a Finn in December 1938. Pym recounted this episode in a short novel written in 1937-38 and published posthumously in the collection Civil to Strangers under the title "Gervase and Flora". They remained fast friends: Henry Harvey was the last person to see her before she died. It should be emphasised that Harvey was not Pym's only "impossible love"; she had several, and systematically turned down all the "possible" ones. It seems unlikely that this was just bad luck...