Social Dimensions in the Novels of Barbara Pym, 1949–1963: The Writer as Hidden Observer (review)

Zeitgeist

Barbara Pym's novels still evoke a slightly apologetic defense by her admirers. Those of us who engage in scholarship on her works feel that we must explain who she is, usually employing terms such as "quintessentially English" to describe an author of the 1950s, writing novels of a quaint, charming, domestic nature. When the sea-change of the 1960s sent her novels out of print, she was unable to publish again until 1977, when her later novels (three only, as she died shortly thereafter) were brought out. So much of her history must be explained, to set her in context. For those who shudder at the prospect of quiet, domestic novels, the enthusiastic reader invariably adds, "Yes, but they are fiendishly witty and astute . . . and they are, at heart, about the essential loneliness of women's lives and about the flavor of the times."

The uncomfortable pause which follows this assertion leaves the unspoken doubt of anything compelling being offered in the setting of 1950s England. It is not remembered as a stirring ideological decade. And yet there were interesting things going on —deep cultural shifts (this again brings us to Pym's erratic publishing history, in which this is reflected). That is, nobody really thought that Pym's books were interesting when dramatic events once again seized public imagination. And all along, her most avid readers have read her for sheer pleasure, rather than for information, zeal, or passion: her most stalwart contemporary champion of great literary stature, Philip Larkin, spoke continuously and enthusiastically of the pleasure of rereading her novels. They are comforting in their amusing description of daily life —or, as Orna Raz notes in her book, they are the kind of novels which many readers could very well be living in themselves.

Thus matters have stood for the past three decades following Pym's "rediscovery" in literary circles.

Orna Raz has given us, in Social Dimensions in the Novels of Barbara Pym, the book that all Pym readers have known —intuitively —would eventually appear, in order to provide a key to the cultural milieu in which the novelist worked, and which she so cleverly reflected in her fiction. To confirmed admirers of Pym's work, nothing could be more absorbing, especially when it also offers wonderful analyses of the ways in which the novels interconnect with each other. But I think that the significance of such a book goes far beyond the small circle of devoted Pym readers.

Part of the reason why no one has done this sort of book before is that it required an enormous amount of work, in the sheer wealth of detail mustered in the pursuit of social history. But more than that, such research demands an ear finely tuned to the nuances of the past. Raz has listened carefully, both to the ideas of the 1950s in England and to the novels themselves, in order to give us a deeper, thoughtful understanding of both and enhance the pleasure with which we return to the novels.

Put into a history-of-ideas context, a study of Pym's novels seems slightly odd. What ideas, one asks? This, of course, is the important point: ideas happen, as it were, at any time and any place, even in the most outwardly conservative setting. And if they have not hardened yet into crushing dogmas, or transformed themselves into a new paradigm, they continue to affect us. This is what Pym felt, intuitively, while making light of this phenomenon. And the point is that contemporary ideas in a culture appear very different from when we look back on it —before perceptions have hardened into stereotypes. This is why it is so crucial to do what Raz has done, which is to look at cultural constructs as nearly as possible from within the time itself, as it was unfolding.

Pym, indeed, wrote about what she observed and...