Photograph by United News / Popperfoto / Getty​

Barbara Pym and the New Spinster

By Hannah Rosefield

April 3, 2015

“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.

Iris Murdoch

Books

Literary hero to zero

This article is more than 10 years old

The only true judge of an author's merits is posterity. But why do some literary reputations last while others founder

DJ Taylor

Saturday 10 May 2024

Towards the end of his long and industrious career, the literary jack-of-all trades Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) sat down to ponder the enticing topic of his reputation. No doubt about it, he briskly informed his friends, in 200 years' time he would be spoken of in the same breath as Jane Austen and Beatrix Potter. Naturally, there is still quite a long way to go before this prophecy is, or isn't, fulfilled, but one doesn't need a crystal ball to suspect that the odds on Nichols's Cats ABC or Down the Garden Path re-emerging as Penguin Modern Classics sometime in the 22nd century are rather on the long side. the end of his long and industrious career, the literary jack-of-all trades Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) sat down to ponder the enticing topic of his reputation. No doubt about it, he briskly informed his friends, in 200 years' time he would be spoken of in the same breath as Jane Austen and Beatrix Potter. Naturally, there is still quite a long way to go before this prophecy is, or isn't, fulfilled, but one doesn't need a crystal ball to suspect that the odds on Nichols's Cats ABC or Down the Garden Path re-emerging as Penguin Modern Classics sometime in the 22nd century are rather on the long side.