Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym was a well known writer - she was born in 1913 and died in 1980. As she grew older her novels did not do so well. They were deemed old fashioned and she had difficulty getting published. She did not publish anything from the early 60s until 1977, but she continued to write. She got a degree at Oxford in English, in the 1930s. She visited Germany quite often, then and was intially attracted by the novelty of Nazism. She fell in love with a young Nazi, but she afterwards realised that fascism was evil and recanted her sympathy. However, her family became uneasy at her frequent visits to Germany as it was becoming clear that Hitler had to be stopped and that in due course, Britain would be at war with the German state. She joined the Womens naval service during the war, and worked at censoring letters. After the war, she took a post in the International African Institution and became an editor of their scholarly magazine about Africa and anthropology. She worked there till her retirement. She never married or had children, but she had several affairs. Her relationships with men seemed to go wrong...and in her fiction, she tends to portray men as arrogant and selfish. Her lovers tended to be unkind to her after a while and the affairs fizzled out. She lived with her sister Hilary in Queen's Park, London. In 1977, she was mentioned by 2 writers, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin as a very under rated writer. This sparked off new interest in her works and she published a new novel Quartet in Autumn. In the 1970's, she developed breast cancer and then stomach cancer. She died in 1980. Her works are now quite popular, and she was one of the first writers to create sympathetic gay characters.