Abstract
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the abrupt caesura in her publishing career, Barbara Pym’s novels group themselves handily into categories: the earliest, most broadly comic — Crampton Hodnet, Some Tame Gazelle, Civil to Strangers, and Excellent Women; the ‘middle’ novels, confident, literary, and brimming with detail — Jane and Prudence, Less Than Angels, A Glass of Blessings, and No Fond Return of Love; and the final, more problematical group — An Unsuitable Attachment, An Academic Question, The Sweet Dove Died, Quartet in Autumn, and A Few Green Leaves. The eight novels comprising the first two groups share a lightness of spirit and tone and inhabit such similar comic worlds that they can be examined together as Pym’s earliest efforts in the novel of manners. These are the works that first enlist Pym’s fans, the ones which establish her consistency and satisfy all the criteria for something ‘very Barbara Pym’.
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Notes
Philip Larkin, ’ The World of Barbara Pym’, Times Literary Supplement (11March 1977 ) p. 260.
Tony Kirk-Greene, ‘Barbara Pym 1913–1980’, Africa 2 (June 1980) p. 94.
Anita Brookner, ‘The Bitter Fruits of Rejection’, The Spectator, 19 (July 1986) p. 30.
Anne Tyler, ‘From England to Brooklyn to West Virginia’, New York Times Book Review, 13 February 1983, p. 1.
Robert Liddell, ‘Two Friends: Barbara Pym and Ivy Compton-Burnett’, London Magazine (August-September 1984) p. 61.
Robert Emmet Long, Barbara Pym ( New York: Ungar Publishing, 1986 ), p. 25.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, Elizabeth Porges Watson (ed.), (London: Oxford University Press, 1972 ) p. 1.
Jane Nardin, Barbara Pym ( Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985 ) pp. 63–4.
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel ( New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927 ) p. 53.
Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes ( New York: Random House, 1981 ), p. 3.
Lotus Snow, One Little Room An Everywhere: Barbara Pym’s Novels ( Orono, Me.: Puckerbrush Press, 1987 ) pp. 31–54.
Victoria Glendinning, ‘Spontaneous Obsession, Imposed Restraint’, New York Times Book Review, 8 July 1984, p. 3.
Michele Slung, ‘Barbara Pym: the Quiet Pleasure of Her Company,’ Washington Post, Book World, 17 January 1988, p. 3.
A. N. Wilson, ‘Daffodil Yellow and Coral Pink’, The Literary Review, June 1985, p. 43–4.
Miranda Seymour, ‘Spinsters in Their Prime’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 June 1985, p. 720.
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© 1992 Annette Weld
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Weld, A. (1992). The Early Novels. In: Barbara Pym and the Novel of Manners. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21690-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21690-1_3
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