Women Victimised by Fiction: living and loving in the novels by Barbara Pym

Abstract

A woman’s life is redeemed by love, or so we have been told in fairy tales, medieval chivalric legends, lyric love poems, and novels. Woman’s destiny is to light a flame in a man’s heart so that all he does in the world is a tribute to her of his passion. She is muse. For her a man sails the world, studies the heavens and the earth and its creatures, divines the laws of God, man and nature, writes books, composes poetry, and preaches sermons. A man lives in relation to the world; a woman in relation to a man. ‘Love’, as Virginia Woolf has summarised the portrayal of women’s lives in literature, ‘was the only possible interpreter’.¹