The Quest for a Career

Abstract

‘Life in 1977. Concorde, costing I don’t know how many millions, flies over our heads, clearly visible from our cottage window, while the road outside is full of potholes as in the 16th-century.’¹ Barbara Pym recorded this incongruity between the old and the very new in a winter letter to her long-time friend and confidant Robert Smith, who had left England in 1959 to teach history in a Nigerian university. Perhaps she herself was feeling like a relic from the past in a modern world, for sixteen frustrating years had elapsed since publishers had last accepted her fiction. She had written six successful novels between 1950 and 1961, but since then she had amassed a large file of rejection letters from publishers, who seemed to find her books too ‘old-fashioned’ for current literary taste.

Two University of California Humanities Awards made it possible for me to do biographical research on Barbara Pym in Oxford. I am indebted to Timothy Rogers, Colin Harris, and their staff at the Bodleian Library for cheerful and patient assistance. I wish to thank Hilary Walton, Hazel Holt and Robert Smith for their time, suggestions and encouragement. And, for their ideas and editorial suggestions, I should like to thank Diane Johnson, Robert Hopkins, Max Byrd, Celeste Turner Wright, Elizabeth Hilliard and above all David Bell, who first introduced me to Barbara Pym’s novels and has been an invaluable friend and adviser.