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Barbara Pym and the New Spinster
“You’ll see it’s exactly like her novels. Everyone here is from their pages,” Laura Shapiro said, when I told her that this was my first time at the Barbara Pym Society’s annual North American conference. It was a Friday night in the middle of March and we were standing with sixty or so other Pym fans in the wood-panelled hall of the Episcopalian Church of the Advent in Boston. On the tables where we would shortly eat dinner were milk bottles full of tulips and daffodils. “I’m so glad we’re not having Pymian food,” I heard a professor of literature say, alluding perhaps to the solitary meals—a boiled egg or half a tin of baked beans—often eaten by her heroines. A woman at my table was telling her companion that her father, a clergyman in New York, retired in 1959. Before the evening was out, I would have three separate conversations about Anthony Trollope. This is Pym’s world: genteel, literary, largely female, located somewhere between academia and the church.
After dinner was a game of trivia—Pym-themed, of course—and the level of Pym obsession became clear. Tom Sopko, the conference organizer, read aloud quotations from her novels and, table by table, we guessed the character they related to. “Today I was in pale coffee brown with touches of black and coral jewellery,” he read, and as soon as he reached “coffee brown” the room filled with sounds of recognition. It was like this for almost every question. The next morning, the conference relocated to Harvard’s Barker Center and the number of attendees expanded to a hundred. The rest of the weekend was spent alternating talks about this year’s featured book, “Quartet in Autumn” (1977), with suitably Pym-ish activities: a sherry party, a dramatized reading, and Evensong back at the Church of the Advent.
Pym published six novels between 1950 and 1961, before her work fell out of favor. Through the nineteen-sixties and most of the nineteen-seventies, she continued to write but was unanimously rejected by publishers; these were not years receptive to comedies of manners set around a parish or an anthropological society. “It seems as if nobody could ever like my kind of writing again,” she wrote in a letter in 1970.
She was wrong. In 1977, the Times Literary Supplement asked a number of figures in the field to name the most underrated writers of the previous seventy-five years. Pym was the only living writer to appear on the list twice, chosen by the biographer Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, the latter praising her “unique eye and ear for the small poignancies and comedies of everyday life.” Almost immediately, Macmillan agreed to publish her next book, “Quartet in Autumn.” It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. “The Sweet Dove Died” followed, in 1978; Macmillan reissued all her previous novels. That same year, Dutton began bringing out her books in the United States. Pym died in 1980.
The Barbara Pym Society was founded in Oxford fourteen years later. Its North American branch started holding conferences in 1999, and for the past four years each has sold out more quickly than the last. (There are plans to move to a bigger venue next year.) Most of the older attendees I spoke to have been reading Pym since the early nineteen-eighties, and, when I asked what they loved about her novels, they described them in the same terms used by Larkin, referring to their “comic irony,” their “nuance and humanity,” and their attention to the “quiet, small dramas of life.” In Pym’s “Less Than Angels” (1955), the protagonist, Catherine Oliphant, reflects that “the smallest things were often so much bigger than the great things … the trivial pleasures like cooking, one’s home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.”
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Raina Lipsitz, who, in her early thirties, was the youngest of the conference’s five speakers, called this rewriting of priorities a “radical act.” Radical, too, Lipsitz suggested, is Pym’s choice of heroines who are ordinary, a little lonely, and socially marginal. This focus on the small and the marginal may help explain why Pym is catching on with another generation of readers and writers: a Pym-like sensibility seems ascendant among women writing and editing for feminist Web sites. The Hairpin, for instance, founded in 2010 as part of the Awl network, calls itself a place for “petty enthusiasms,” while The Toast, started in 2013, likens itself to “a long email chain about force-ranking the Mitford sisters” and seeks writers who are “incorrigibly bossy, or intractably odd, or happily obsessive.” One finds Pym’s name invoked in the comment sections of both sites, as well as in the occasional article. In 2013, The Awl published a long essay titled “Marvelous Spinster: Barbara Pym at 100.”
That word “spinster” is key to understanding Pym’s persistent and seemingly resurgent appeal. Critics often compare Pym to Jane Austen, but several people at the conference told me that they regard her novels as comfort reading precisely because they forsake Austen’s happy endings: her spinsters remain spinsters, and the breaking off of an engagement often produces more celebration than its announcement. (Pym herself never married, though she had many more affairs than her characters do.) The word is all over The Toast, meanwhile, its usage sometimes jokey but never derogatory. One of its regular advice columns, which answers readers’ problems with poetry recommendations, is called “The Spinster’s Almanac.” In an interview for The New Republic last year, Mallory Ortberg, the co-founder and editor of The Toast, said that she would “love for my next book to be a light comic novella called The Merry Spinster.” She added that “female solitude is a mental condition as well as a physical state. You can be married and a spinster.”
This is also the argument of “Spinster,” a blend of memoir, biography, and social history by Kate Bolick, which will be published later this month. Bolick hopes that “spinster” might become “shorthand for holding on to that in you which is independent and self-sufficient, whether you’re single or coupled.” More than Pym’s enthusiasm for small pleasures or her interest in ordinary lives, it’s this idea—that female singleness is temperamental rather than a legal or social status—that seems to make her simpatico with a younger set of women writers and readers.
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Consider Mildred Lathbury, the thirty-one-year-old narrator of “Excellent Women” (1952) and the archetypal Pym spinster. Mildred is one of the “excellent women” of her novel’s title: efficient, virtuous and uncomplaining, expecting little and receiving little. Her clergyman father has died, and she lives in reduced circumstances in London, where she works part time for the Society for the Care of Distressed Gentlewomen (“a cause very near to my own heart, as I felt that I was just the kind of person who might one day become one”). She spends her leisure hours dealing with the problems that arise in her church community and in the marriage of her new, glamorous neighbors.
The critic John Bayley wrote that Pym’s novels “take entirely for granted the fact that we live in two worlds, one of extreme triviality typified by the work situation, social exchange, irritations, small comforts of eating and drinking” and one of “romance, aspiration, love-longing, loneliness, despair.” Bayley’s characterization of this second world is a little too melancholy, but the duality he identifies is central to Pym’s work. Mildred and her equivalents in other Pym novels do nothing that is bold or unconventional. They have few ambitions beyond maintaining a perfect respectability. But their mental landscapes are extravagant. As they deal with life’s small pleasures and frustrations, they speculate and fantasize, inventing pasts and futures for their acquaintances and developing crushes on pompous academics and probably-celibate clergymen.
Almost without exception, these men are self-important, demanding, and a little ridiculous. (They have more than a little in common with men as characterized by The Toast—see, for example, Ortberg’s Western Art History series, which collects paintings of men oblivious to women’s disdain for them.) The very names of Pym’s male characters (Rockingham Napier, Alaric Lydgate) make it clear that they are better as romantic fantasies than as husbands. Her excellent women know this, and they practice a second kind of duality: the ability both to fall in love and to recognize the absurdity of that love, or its object.
If Pym’s spinsters do not marry, it is in part because marriage does not seem to offer an improvement on their current state. They are often lonely and bored, but life is lonely and boring for us all (it’s not for nothing that Larkin loved Pym’s novels, or that the two writers became good friends). Her men rely on such women to take care of life’s logistical and emotional difficulties; if Mildred were to marry, her whole self would be absorbed into such duties, and her mental freedom curtailed. In “Quartet in Autumn,” one of Pym’s bleaker novels, the spinster Letty, another excellent woman, wonders despondently how she, born in the English countryside in 1914, should find herself approaching sixty and living in shared accommodation in a London changed beyond recognition by immigration and social reform. She concludes that it must be “because she had not married. No man had taken her away and immured her in some comfortable suburb.” Even at this moment of isolation and disorientation, Letty sees marriage as immurement.
Not all Pym’s main characters are spinsters. Jane Cleveland, in “Jane and Prudence” (1953), and Wilmet Forsyth, in “A Glass of Blessings” (1958), are both married, to a clergyman and a civil servant respectively. Their marriages are reasonably happy, if dull. But they are not excellent women. They are kind, certainly—most of Pym’s heroines are kind—but they are also fanciful and absent-minded, no good at washing a clergyman’s robes or cooking a chicken. Jane wriggles out of the Mothers’ Union meeting at her husband’s church in favor of drifting round London daydreaming about buying foie gras. “After all,” she says to her husband, “I don’t really feel so very much of a mother, having had only one child.” When two eccentric priests, living together, tell Wilmet that they are looking for a housekeeper, she wonders whether she should put herself forward for the role—not because she would perform it well but because the beseeching look of one of the priests seduces her into imagining another world. The fantasy lasts only a moment: “Then, of course, I remembered that I was married and could hardly leave Rodney even if I did nothing very much in the way of housekeeping for him.”
Jane and Wilmet are Ortberg and Bolick’s married spinsters, even if they lived at the wrong time to describe themselves as such. Their minds slide off housework into poetry or fantasy. They are fond of their husbands, but they live their inner lives alone.
Pym portrays singleness as an identity rather than an absence, one that compensates for its social and material disadvantages by facilitating an unusually rich imaginative existence. Her novels end not with spinsters taking consolation in small pleasures but with worlds opening up. Mildred becomes aware that she “might be going to have … ‘a full life’ after all.” Prudence, the stylish spinster in “Jane and Prudence,” is “suddenly overwhelmed by the richness of her life.” Even Letty realizes that life “still held infinite possibilities for change.” Pym is not a romantic writer, but she is a cautiously hopeful one. It was to this hopefulness that the speakers at the Pym conference kept returning, even when the novel under discussion was one of her least cheerful. Though the world Pym portrays no longer exists, her characters’ combination of stoicism and optimism feels peculiarly modern. It enables them to develop what Lipsitz called “the emotional resilience and resourcefulness required to live alone”—and not merely to live alone but to take pleasure in doing so.
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Hannah Rosefield is a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard University.
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