Barbara Pym

Excellent Women is probably the most famous of Barbara Pym's novels. The acclaim a few years ago for this early comic novel, which was hailed by Lord David Cecil as one of 'the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years,' helped launch the rediscovery of the author's …

This is a wonderfully accomplished farce beginning with the joke of using her own name in the title (Barbara Mary Crampton Pym). From that point she sails off into a wickedly comedic farce, focusing- in recognizingly "Pym" fashion- on the unsuitable romantic entanglements of a curate and a pretty young girl, both of …

When Barbara Pym died in 1980 she left a considerable amount of unpublished material. This volume contains an early novel, CIVIL TO STRANGERS, three novellas and an autobiographical essay, 'Finding a Voice', Pym's only written commentary on her writing career. In CIVIL TO STRANGERS the lives of a young couple, …

Caroline Grimstone, the bored young wife of an ambitious anthropologist, finds a cure for her tedium in reading to the elderly and becoming a party to her husband's purloining of an important manuscript

An Unsuitable Attachment is a novel by Barbara Pym, written in 1963 and published posthumously in 1982. This novel is notable as being the first of Pym's novels to be rejected by publishers after she had established herself as a novelist. The book was originally rejected by Cape, who had published Pym's first six …

A Glass of Blessings is a novel by Barbara Pym, first published in 1958. The title is taken from the poem The Pulley by George Herbert.