SOURCE: "Out of the Swim with Barbara Pym," in The American Scholar, Vol. 52, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 237-42.

In the following essay, Kapp provides an overview of the major themes and characters in Pym's novels, noting the "sheer spinal firmness and imperturbable detachment that puts her into the rank of first-rate novelists."

In the canny, delectable novels of the British writer Barbara Pym, we can count on finding sanctuary from the enormous liberties and vast territory that have been gained by modern fiction. Miss Pym's unworldly cast—absentminded vicars beaming kindly over their spectacles, stilted anthropologists back from Africa with charts and kinship diagrams, accommodating clergymen's daughters snug in their modest legacies of Hepplewhite chairs and Victorian ornaments—preordains an absence of garish crime, sexual revelation, or hearts of darkness.

The setting, comfortably confining, is usually the parish church. "I sometimes thought how strange it was that I should...