Barbara Pym Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Lynn Veach Sadler

SOURCE: "Spinsters, Non-Spinsters, and Men in the World of Barbara Pym," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, Spring, 1985, pp. 141-54.

In the following essay, Sadler considers Pym's depiction of unmarried women and male characters in her novels. "In the Pym world," Sadler concludes, "bores and boors can be male and female, and men can out-spinster spinsters."

At age fifty, Barbara (Mary Crampton) Pym, having published six novels appreciated by a small but faithful audience, suddenly found her seventh work refused by her publisher. She wrote nothing else for some sixteen years until she was "discovered" in a March 11, 1977, Times Literary Supplement feature on underrated and overrated writers of the past seventy-five years as evaluated by a symposium of literary critics. Lauded by Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, she was the only writer to be twice praised. Subsequently, she re-emerged with Quartet in...
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