Barbara Pym was an incomparable chronicler of ordinary, quiet lives. With warmth, humour, precision and great vividness, she gave her best characters an independent life we recognise as totally familiar. In A Few Green Leaves, her last novel, her heroine is Emma Howick, anthropologist. Through her eyes Barbara Pym examines in her own ironic and individual style the quiet revolution in English village life, combining the rural settings of her earliest novels with the themes and characters of her later works. The result is a ...
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Barbara Pym was an incomparable chronicler of ordinary, quiet lives. With warmth, humour, precision and great vividness, she gave her best characters an independent life we recognise as totally familiar. In A Few Green Leaves, her last novel, her heroine is Emma Howick, anthropologist. Through her eyes Barbara Pym examines in her own ironic and individual style the quiet revolution in English village life, combining the rural settings of her earliest novels with the themes and characters of her later works. The result is a compelling portrait of a town that seems to be forgotten by time, but which is unmistakably affected by it. Romance shares the pages with death in this engaging novel that is the culmination of Barbara Pym's acclaimed writing career. 'I could go on reading her for ever' A L Rowse, Punch 'A vivid sense of how we live now' New Statesman 'Her sense of brilliant comedy is a direct inheritance from Jane Austen' Hibernia 'A beautifully written, very delicate comedy' Times Literary Supplement
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Those who know Pym's books, like me, and re-read them, need no introduction.
Those who haven't, should give one of her better known books a try, like "No Fond Return of Love". This isn't her best. But she's a special writer, capturing the unmarried women and men (not necessarily lonely, note) who lived in the suburbs and small towns near London, often working for academics in thankless research, like indexing books, who find joy and pleasure in small things. Pym's books are full of wry observations and funny touches but there's also a melancholy side in dashed hopes and misguided expectations. I love her unsentimental take on life and the way she gives dignity to single women in that era (50s) who often were given little status and/or respect.
