SOURCE: "Pym's Singular Interest: The Self as Spinster," in Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel, edited by Laura L. Doan, University of Illinois Press, 1991, pp. 139-54.

In the following essay, Doan examines Pym's portrayal of unmarried women as a reflection of the author's personal struggle to reconcile her own feelings about marriage and sexuality. Doan describes Pym's version of spinsterhood as "an alternative life-style which offers women an active role in society and allows them the opportunity to examine others critically."

In the spring of 1938, the twenty-four-year-old Barbara Pym made a curious, even bizarre, declaration in a joint letter addressed to her closest friends. Writing in an uncharacteristic, stream-of-consciousness style and rendering herself the subject by using the detached third person, Pym proclaims herself a spinster: "And Miss Pym is looking out of the window—and you will be asking now who is...