An ironical Jane Austen anyone?

Often considered to be a much underrated author, Barbara Pym's books were full of shrewd, acerbic observations.

Barbara Pym’s heroines — and it was a bit hard to classify her protagonists as heroines given that they rarely did anything in the classical hero mould — were often verging-on-the- middle-aged unmarried women from the genteel English middle classes. They were mostly observers of the action around them, standing in corners of rooms or at windows and watching as others led the more exciting lives.

Pym was born in 1913 and the bulk of her work was published before the counterculture movement of the swinging 60s when her chronicles of clergymen, churches and gentle flirtation fell out of favour. She was let go of by her publisher and concentrated on her day job at the International African Institute. It was only in 1977 after a Times Literary Supplement feature saw her being mentioned as one of the most underrated novelists of the century — both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil voted for her — that her fortunes revived.

Her novel, Quartet in Autumn, was published that same year and was shortlisted for the Booker. But after her death three years later, she once again faded away. It is only in this century and with champions such as the feminist publishing house Virago that Pym has once again been rediscovered by audiences. Literary websites of the 2010s — both active and defunct — have time and again gone back to Pym and held her up as a modern Jane Austen.

The most Pym-like book, the one to read if you’ve never read her before, is ‘Excellent Women’. It was her second novel, published in 1952, and best encapsulates her outlook on life, love and marriage. Unlike Austen whose novels almost inevitably ended in lovers’ unions and exchanges of vows, Pym’s narratives tended to take a more acerbic view of the marital state. There’s no guarantee of happily ever after in her works and ‘Excellent Women’ ends leaving the romantic/marital fate of her heroine, Mildred Lathbury, ambiguous.

The book is set in post-war London among the churchgoing, garden fete and jumble sale organising set. They are not rich — but nor are they exactly poor. Mildred has a limited income and helps out with aforementioned fetes and sales and life takes a more interesting turn when new neighbours, the Napiers, move in next door. They are impossibly glamourous and seem to be having marital troubles and Mildred finds herself drawn into their vortex.

There is an anthropologist, Everard Bone, who is also caught up in the tangle of the Napiers’ lives, and thus, by extension, becomes an acquaintance of Mildred’s. Their relationship deepens over the course of the story and through Mildred’s eyes, we see the frustrations and little sins that all these excellent women and the not-so-excellent men around them commit.

Pym’s world might look quaint and conservative. While the characters judge, scheme and fail in being better human beings, Pym herself, with her deep empathy and compassion,
doesn’t. If you were to choose a chronicler for your life, she’d be the one you’d want.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

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