Barbara Pym Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jean E. Kennard

SOURCE: "Barbara Pym and Romantic Love," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 44-60.

In the following essay, Kennard considers comparisons between Pym and Jane Austen, concluding that, unlike Austen, Pym subverts the traditional romance plot by focusing on older, unmarried female characters who take pleasure in the mundane realities of ordinary life.

Barbara Pym's work is markedly different from that of other contemporary women novelists. On the surface her early novels in particular have the coziness of a Jane Austen world, and it is to Austen, whose influence Pym acknowledged, that she is most frequently compared. A. L. Rowse has called her "the Jane Austen de nos jours." Diana Benet claims that readers of Pym "are reminded of Austen because of her satiric and detailed treatment of a distinctive social group, and because of her narrative method." But, though the influence of Austen is clear, Pym...
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