Her novels may seem to come down, like Austen’s, on the side of sense, but the inner life from which they sprang was a maelstrom of sensibility, a confusion of disproportionate feelings lavished upon badly chosen men. Anyone in 1963 who still wanted fiction set in the vicarage, publishers thought, could go back to Jane Austen, the writer to whom Pym has ceaselessly, and often wrongly, been compared. But there are always altars to be decorated, charitable jumble sales to be organized, improving lectures to be attended. Life in Pym’s world is spiced up by the occasional emergence of an exotic or a rogue: the Hungarian businessman in “ Civil to Strangers” (written in 1936 and published posthumously), the womanizing widower of “ Jane and Prudence” (1953). Each self-denying single woman, like the heroine of “ Some Tame Gazelle,” Pym’s first novel, is deemed “fortunate in needing very little to make her happy,” though the blunt, truthtelling housekeeper generally knows better. Pym’s novels are filled with the arrivals of new curates, the struggles of “decayed gentlewomen,” the ditherings of clerical and academic wives. It makes a certain brutal sense that in 1963 this spinster (a term Pym embraced) would be sheared away from British culture, along with Harold Macmillan and below-the-knee hemlines. Two years later, the author, about to turn fifty, was dropped by her editor, and she quickly disappeared from the reading public’s consciousness.
It appears to end on page 482, after a single decade (1950-61) during which six witty books achieved some modest success. One reaches page 388 of Paula Byrne’s new biography, “ The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym” (HarperCollins), before the subject’s career as a published novelist begins. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.