The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

Written by Paula Byrne

Narrated by Antonia Beamish

‘Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously’ JILLY COOPER

Picked as a Book to Look Forward to in 2021 by the Guardian, The Times and the Observer

A Radio 4 Book of the Week, April 2021

Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of the late twentieth century, revealing the inner workings of domestic life so brilliantly that her friend Philip Larkin announced her the era’s own Jane Austen. But who was Barbara Pym and why was the life of this English writer – one of the greatest chroniclers of the human heart – so defined by rejection, both in her writing and in love?

Pym lived through extraordinary times. She attended Oxford in the thirties when women were the minority. She spent time in Nazi Germany, falling for a man who was close to Hitler. She made a career on the Home Front as a single working girl in London’s bedsit land. Through all of this, she wrote. Diaries, notes, letters, stories and more than a dozen novels – which as Byrne shows more often than not reflected the themes of Pym’s own experience: worlds of spinster sisters and academics in unrequited love, of powerful intimacies that pulled together seemingly humble lives.

Paula Byrne’s new biography is the first to make full use of Barbara Pym’s archive. Brimming with new extracts from Pym’s diaries, letters and novels, this book is a joyous introduction to a woman who was herself the very best of company.

Byrne brings Barbara Pym back to centre stage as one of the great English novelists: a generous, shrewdly perceptive writer and a brave woman, who only in the last years of her life was suddenly, resoundingly recognised for her genius.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Release date: Apr 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780008322236

Paula Byrne

Paula Byrne is the critically acclaimed author of five biographies, including Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice, The Real Jane Austen, and Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. She lives in Oxford, England, with her husband, the academic and biographer Jonathan Bate.

Reviews for The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

[ponsonby_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Paula Byrne wrote a very good book ('Mad World') about the author Evelyn Waugh and in her biography of Barbara Pym she has succeeded again in producing something special. Even those who know a good deal already about Pym and love her works will learn more. In writing this book Byrne has been helped a good deal by the fact that as she says, Pym is 'the most autogiographical of writers'. So this is not a formal biography (though properly researched and referenced) but rather an account of the way Pym transmuted her own life and its not very sensational happenings into novels which celebrate daily life. It is made easy to read by an engaging flowing style, and short chapters.Byrne deals extensively and sympathetically with the episodes where Pym is in love with an SS officer, but there is a certain superficiality about them (he is said often to be 'close to Hitler' but it is never explained how, since he was not very senior, and there is no trace of his having been subjected after WWII to de-nazification or trial). And one wonders whether there is a reluctance to admit that Pym might have been quite happy to have the same views as the 1930s SS officer, even if she later 'recanted' by removing relevant parts of 'Some Tame Gazelle' – for which there was a commercial imperative. Certainly in the 1930s she was not of the same view about these matters as her sister and friend Jock Liddell, as the book does show. The book does not aspire to literary criticism, but contains views about the novels; on the whole these seem sound but are perhaps too easy on the lesser works like 'A Few Green Leaves' and 'An Academic Question.' And Byrne's attempts to show that Pym adapted to changing times are a little laboured; these two books demonstrate through their uncertain handling of material that she didn't adapt well (the other two later books, 'A Quartet in Autumn' and 'The Sweet Dove Died' are more securely rooted in her own experiences).Byrne perhaps spends too much time on the Pym/Jane Austen comparison. Although they both set their books in daily life, they were in reality very different writers (for example, Austen has very little description of houses and their contents, or clothes). To be fair, Pym herself downplayed this comparison when made in her own lifetime by those who should perhaps have known better.The friendship between Pym and Larkin (an unlikely one in some ways) is well handled and given proper weight.There are some minor niggles; although the acknowledgements mention a copyedit, the book couldn have done with another, as several places where information is duplicated persist. I found one instance where two characters mentioned as being from one novel are those in another. And one wonders why such a good author twice misuses the word 'fulsome'. But these are small matters. This is a book to sink into and enjoy.

[juliestielstra · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I am a great admirer of Barbara Pym's novels. I was looking forward to this, and had a fairly long wait on the library reserve list for my turn. I lasted 21 pages. Which, admittedly, is not a very extensive sample. But I simply couldn't stand it.Pym herself was often sly, funny, drily sardonic. But that is not the same thing as flippant and "cute." Byrne, in an ostensible nod to Pym's love of 18th-century literature, gives her many chapters specious titles like: "In which we learn how a Servant Girl... is seduced by a Gentleman and gives birth to a Baby Boy," or "In which our Heroine goes to Germany for the third time and sleeps with her Nazi."And the indexing... my god. Curious as to the possible link between Jock Liddell and the Liddell family of Alice in Wonderland fame, I checked the index. Almost two full, dense columns of entries, in order (apparently) by the first page number of mention, so the entries go some thing like: Pym darns socks of, 114-5; discovers Pym and Harvey in bed, 116;...lives with brother in Oxford, 131. What the what?! Indexes are supposed to help a reader pinpoint a specific issue or detail. This is an abysmal and no doubt computer-generated list with zero human intelligence applied. (Sorry, but as a librarian, I have some training in indexing, and this offends.)When, in the chapter about the "Servant Girl," Byrne interjects the glib comment "So far so Thomas Hardy," I was done.A biography can be written with warmth, with wit, with an unconventional viewpoint. But artifice, labored wisecracks, and an ongoing effort to be cute and funny wore out this reader very quickly indeed. Too much eye-rolling makes it hard to keep reading.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had just finished an honors course on Jane Austen and graduated from university when I read an article on the most underrated writers. Barbara Pym was mentioned by two contributors. And that is how I came to read every one of Pym’s reissued and newly published novels. A number of my copies are first American hardbound editions.I was excited to learn that Paula Byrne was writing a biography of Pym and when the galley became available quickly requested it. It was a joy to revisit Pym’s life and works.It is shocking to consider that in the early 60s Pym’s publisher rejected her books as ‘cozy domestic comedies.’ Homosexuality was a crime until 1967, but Pym’s novels have gay characters. There are all kinds of ‘unsuitable attachments,’ women falling for younger men or gay men or married men. How did the publisher miss Pym’s biting satire?Pym’s life was anything but conventional, a woman who loved deeply and unwisely.She went to Oxford a mere twelve years after they first admitted female students. She immediately began obsessing over boys, stalking them and basically throwing herself at them. She was date raped and slept with a man who she knew didn’t value her. She met a gay man who became a dear lifetime friend. She traveled to Germany and fell in love with a man in the SS; it took a long while for her esteem for Nazism to be shaken. Early in WWII, she and her sister Hilary took in children evacuated from London. She joined the WRENS. She fell in love with a married man, a known philanderer. And, she fell in love with a younger gay man. She kept in touch with her old lovers and was distraught when dropped.Pym’s novels are laugh out loud humorous. And they are poignant, exploring our penchant to allow our heart to fog our judgement. They were extremely autobiographical and based on people in her life.I realized how so much of Pym’s picadilloes I had shared as a teenager. Stalking boys I liked as a teenager. Enjoying being in love with a boy who kept his distance, just needing to have someone to love.. Keeping a journal.Byrne’s title comes from Pym’s diaries which were prefaced “The Adventures of Miss Pym,” and the chapters have lively titles like “Miss Pym attempts her First Novel. ‘Young Men in Fancy Dress,’ or ‘In which our Heroine goes to Germany for the third time and sleeps with her Nazi.’And yes, Pym and a Nazi SS man fell in love and she perhaps could have married him. She sported a swastika pin. When she could no longer ignore the truth, she shut it all up and pretended it never happened. Although, she was glad to later learn that her Nazi didn’t approve of Nazi genocide.Pym’s novels, published and unpublished, are discussed and it sent me back to my collection, opening books and revisiting them. I opened Some Tame Gazelle and found myself chuckling, wanting to waylay my husband and read it out loud.I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

[roarer-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The book was a Christmas present from a friend who must think I've read more Barbara Pym than I actually have. Over the years I have read three of her novels, but only one stood out for me, "A glass of blessings". Paula Byrne has written an excellent and important biography showing how the life and art were intertwined, and how Pym's experiences and her forensic observation of humanity fed into her writing. The overlap between fiction writing and anthropology fascinated me. I'm not sure I warmed to the subject - finding her multiple personalities and stalking quite disconcerting, so I was left wondering how this impinged upon her lamentable judgement of men, continually tantalised by men incapable of providing what she yearned for. It would be unwise simply to construe this as the common lot of a problem of a clever, creative and highly educated woman in mid-20th century England, because Byrne suggests that at her core there was something a bit weird about Barbara Pym.