In 1943, mourning the end of a short-lived love affair that would leave her (even months later) sitting “desolately by the fire shivering uncontrollably with an aching head and longing to be cherished,” Barbara Pym recorded walking by a pre-Raphaelite tomb and brooding a little. At this point her diary takes a turn:
You (reader) may say, Why do you make such a thing of it all? To which I will snap (like Trivia) Well, what about your own life? Is it so full of large, big wonderful things that you don’t need tombs and daffodils and your own special intolerable bird, with an old armchair or two and occasional readings from Matthew Arnold and Coventry Patmore?
In ’43, Pym was not even a published novelist (and would not be for several years). She was her own reader, both chiding herself and coming to her own defense. But it was this kind of two-step, from sorrow to humor and back again, that came to define what was best in her fiction. After 1963, when she experienced a rather different sort of rejection—when no one would publish her anymore—she repeated this sharp question in a slightly different way: “What is wrong with being obsessed with trivia? . . . What are the minds of my critics filled with? What nobler and more worthwhile things?”
Pym’s own life can be summed up in short order: born 1913, died 1980. In between: an Oxford education, twelve novels, lifelong spinsterhood, and a thriving correspondence with many friends, including Philip Larkin. Beginning in 1950, she published six decently successful novels only to be shown the door by Jonathan Cape, her publishing house, on the grounds that “in present conditions we could not sell a sufficient number of copies to cover costs.” Many years of rejection followed, only for Pym to be gloriously reinstated by the Times Literary Supplement in 1977, when two separate critics picked her as the most underrated novelist of the past seventy-five years. In the wave of interest that followed, she was even nominated for the Booker Prize. All the novels that she wrote in isolation were published, though she did not live to see them all in print, as she soon died of cancer.
