Illustration by DG Strong

I was looking for the book equivalent of comfort food when I began reading Barbara Pym’s novels six years ago. “Which threat color is it today?” I wondered each morning, packing my briefcase with bottled water, flashlight, and cell phone. I live in Chicago, and there was a long period when the news reports kept hinting we might face a terrifying subway emergency en route to work. Pym’s books helped me to forget about all that. Her London novels remind us that, even in a big city, life is broken down into neighborhoods, parishes, business offices; each of these, seen through Pym’s honest and benevolent gaze, takes on the spirit of a country village, where effortless humor can be found at church bazaars and dull anthropology lectures, and a thrill can be felt upon the arrival of an attractive new neighbor.

For aspiring writers, Pym’s body of work offers an added gift: The story of her roller-coaster ride career gives us all hope for some success (just one published book, who would begrudge a person this?) before death summons us from our laptops.

Pym, a wry, unassuming Brit who lived from 1913 to 1980, was one of the most accomplished comic novelists of the past fifty years, yet few of my friends have heard her name. More often than not, she’s absent from bookstores; the novels go in and out of print. This injustice must be put right. I understand all too well how the die-hard “Buffy” fans, the Scientologists, and the indefatigable Trekkies must feel, gathered at their Vegas conferences, perplexed that they don’t have the world on their side—yet. It’s only a matter of time (I tell myself) before everyone else finally understands and appreciates. Only a matter of time.

In Pym’s case, part of the challenge is time: She belonged to an earlier one. Though most of her novels are set in a realistic twentieth century London, they evoke a decidedly bygone world— hats and gloves in respectable tea rooms, stuffy church halls, and ashtrays on office desks. Pym’s bygone world also reflects a particularly absurd comic sensibility in which an Anglican rectory assistant found to have stolen a Fabergé egg is funnier than most of the situations encountered in contemporary fiction: ill-timed flatulence, or terrible sex, or whatever it is people are finding funny these days instead of finding Barbara Pym funny. On the surface, her characters may not share much in common with our generation of Bridget Joneses, but it’s entirely possible they went to school with one of Bridget’s unmarried, slyly observant aunts, Winifred or Allegra.

Pym’s career started well, by any standard. Between 1950 and 1961, she published six novels, all with the same publisher and to fine reviews. The heroines of these early novels have charmingly archaic British names: Wilmet in A Glass of Blessings, Mildred in Excellent Women, Belinda in Some Tame Gazelle, and Dulcie in No Fond Return Of Love. The characters are seldom rich but live in modest comfort. Most of Pym’s novels are set in London’s less fashionable neighborhoods. The social life of an Anglican church is often at the center — a world she knew well, as the daughter of a church organist and a regular churchgoer herself. Because of the era in which they were written, the female characters, who are still unmarried in their thirties, regard themselves, in a practical way, as “spinsters” or “excellent women,” always trying to help out in low-profile but vital ways.

What amused Pym most was exposing the inner lives behind this “spinster” façade. Rarely motivated by altruism alone, Pym’s heroines may be vain, insecure, amorous, clueless, competitive, and always entertaining. In Excellent Women, Mildred confesses, “In the train we read the school magazine, taking a secret pleasure in belittling those of the Old Girls who had done well and in rejoicing over those who had failed to fulfill their early promise.” Often, Pym’s women meet each other with wary reluctance, as in No Fond Return Of Love: “Viola thought with irritation that Dulcie was just the kind of person who would say it was ‘nice’ to have a cup of indifferent coffee with a lot of odd-looking people. She had already classified her as a ‘do-gooder,’ the kind of person who would interfere in the lives of others with what are known as ‘the best motives.’ She determined to shake her off as soon as she could.”

Clergymen, too, are the frequent subject of Pym’s comedy. As seen by the female members of their parish, these men may be pompous, peculiar, insightful, stand-offish, flirtatious, or any combination of the above. In A Glass of Blessings, Wilmet reports, “He was one of those preachers who, on coming to the end of what they have to say, find it impossible to stop. Sentence after sentence seemed as if it must be the last but still he went on. I felt as if I had been wrapped round and round in a cocoon of wordiness, like a great suffocating eiderdown.”

As with the work of Jane Austen, to whom Pym is often compared, Pym’s early novels explore the truth and humor found in ordinary social transactions: between two hapless people on what may or may not be a date, between a handsome new vicar and the single women in his congregation, or between aging school friends still linked by proximity or dutiful convention. Unlike the matchmaker Austen, however, Pym is more interested in the long-term survival of the single person. She manages to make the single life feel romantic and certainly preferable to the stupor of marriage. Pym herself never married, instead sharing quarters in London and Oxford with her sister Hilary, to whom many of the novels are dedicated. Pym’s author photos show an unglamorous woman with freckled arms, wearing flowery vests, and often holding one of her beloved cats.

While Pym may have felt she was building an audience with the early novels, they did not make her rich. They were not even sold outside of England. To support herself, she never quit her full-time job, editing a journal for the International African Institute in London — a somber environment that provided plenty of material for Pym’s absurd inventions (for example, the Indigent Anthropologists’ Food and Wine Fund).

In 1963, the year she turned 50, Pym’s circumstances changed without warning. In the spring of that year, her new manuscript, An Unsuitable Attachment, was rejected from her longtime publisher, Jonathan Cape, Inc., in part for being too tame and too prim, especially in contrast to the era’s sexier, grittier new generation of American writers: John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, and later, Jacqueline Susann. Several other publishers also rejected it. One publisher wrote: “We think it’s very well written, but there’s an old-fashioned air about it.”

The rejections made Pym doubt the worth of the new novel. In May 1963, she wrote to her friend, the poet Philip Larkin, “Of course it may be that this novel is much worse than my others, though they didn’t say so.” Five months later, she sent the manuscript to Larkin, with a disclaimer: “You will see exactly why a new publisher wouldn’t take it on, I think; the beginning is too vague, too many characters, and there’s not enough plot. And who is the heroine? I think perhaps I could rewrite it sometime, but not now, as I have started something else.”

The next project seems to be a direct response to her publisher’s demand for something more contemporary, more daring. The Sweet Dove Died features Leonora Eyre, an overly proud and refined single woman in her late forties, as she meets two eligible men at an auction: Humphrey, a dull widower her own age, and James, his handsome nephew. The novel traces Leonora’s relationship with both of these men: Humphrey, who courts her, and James, the true object of Leonora’s affection and frustration, who is clearly(clear to the reader anyway) gay. The American writer David Leavitt, who counts Pym among his own influences, has called Pym “one of the first English writers to include homosexual characters in her work without sensationalizing or condemning them.” Even in her earlier novel A Glass of Blessings, the restless heroine, Wilmet, seeks a bit of harmless fun in the company of Piers, the charming, mysterious brother of her friend Rowena. Wilmet’s excitement at the prospect of spending the afternoon at Piers’ flat is matched only by her surprise and fascination upon meeting his roommate, Keith, who models for sewing patterns.

Despite its racier premise, Pym had no luck finding a publisher for The Sweet Dove Died. More than twenty publishers said no to it. One praised the writing but said it was “not the kind of novel to which people are turning.” Pym even took to sending it out under a fake name, thinking that whatever reputation she had made for herself during the 1950s was now more of a liability than an asset. In 1972, finally resigned to the notion that her style was obsolete and her ideas irrelevant, Pym wrote in her journal, “What is the future of my kind of writing? What can my notebooks contain except the normal kinds of bits and pieces that can never…now be worked into fiction?”

Still, she kept at it. Quartet in Autumn which she wrote during the early 1970s, chronicles the comical and sad private thoughts of four lonely office mates as they all face retirement. In July 1974, Pym wrote to Philip Larkin, “It’s rather discouraging to go on writing with so little hope of publication, but I try not to think about that. By the way, the letter I wrote to [the magazine] ‘The Author’ about never getting published was never published, which seems to be the final accolade of failure.” She sent Quartet in Autumn to publishers without success.

Just when things were at their bleakest (cue the “Rocky” music), Pym’s fortune again reversed. It was January 1977. “The Times Literary Supplement” had asked important writers of the day to offer their own lists of the most underrated novelists of the 20th Century. Pym’s was the only name that appeared on two lists: Philip Larkin’s and Lord David Cecil’s. Shrewdly guessing that the literary climate might be welcoming again, Pym at once sent her unpublished manuscripts around to editors.

A month later, the phone rang. It was Valentine’s Day (naturally), and Pym was right in character: She was sitting alone at home, sewing. She answered the telephone and spoke to an editor from Macmillan, who asked for her approval to publish Quartet in Autumn. The following year, the novel was short listed for the Booker Prize. In the spring of 1978, in a BBC radio essay, Pym said of Quartet in Autumn, “I think some readers have been disappointed in this novel because it seems less lighthearted than some of my earlier ones, yet I enjoyed the writing of it almost more than any of the others, perhaps because I felt that I was writing for my own pleasure with no certain hope of publication at that time.”

Macmillan also purchased The Sweet Dove Died and A Few Green Leaves, Pym’s last novel, which she completed shortly before she died of cancer in 1980. In the end, twelve of her novels found their way to publication, plus Civil to Strangers, a book of uncollected and unfinished pieces, and A Very Private Eye, selected letters and journal entries that chronicle the highs and lows of Pym’s career. Before Pym died, the novels finally began to appear in America, where even John Updike was compelled to write: “[Pym’s work], arriving on these shores in a heyday of sexual hype, is a startling reminder that solitude may be chosen, and that a lively, full novel can be constructed entirely within the precincts of that regressive virtue, feminine patience.”

A happy ending for Pym, this final recognition before death — yet to this day her works have failed to attract a wide audience. Even my friends who devour writers like Diane Johnson, Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Anita Brookner have overlooked Pym at the local library. By the mid-1990s, most of the titles had fallen out of print. Only the Plume edition of “Excellent Women” could be found at the larger chains, a single copy nestled between whole rows of Pushkin and Pynchon. (Can Pynchon really draw a larger audience than Pym? I can hardly believe this is true. Maybe his hip and edgy reputation keeps him a useful accessory on college bookshelves; to my knowledge, nobody ever got laid because Barbara Pym was on their shelf, but, regrettably, many of us have been seduced by men who claim to read Pynchon.)

Let’s face it, Pym and her publishers were never marketing geniuses. Her novels have typically been published with undistinguished abstract covers with tasteful floral or geometric designs — the kind of thing we used to see on Kleenex boxes. This series of book jackets, designed by Jacqueline Schuman for E.P. Dutton in the 1970s, was reused by the Penguin/Plume editions in the mid-1980s. In fact, they’re used in the editions published six years ago by Moyer Bell, a small Rhode Island press.

Pym’s titles, too, reveal little of the lively stories to be found behind those odd covers. Part of me wishes that Pym had christened her novels with sexier subtitles. May I suggest: A Glass of Blessings or A Thief at the Parsonage. Excellent Women or The Hunky New Tenant. The Sweet Dove Died or My Queer Young Suitor. Perhaps we need a clever film adaptation with Emma Thompson and Rupert Everett to shine the spotlight on Barbara Pym once and for all — but is Hollywood ready for a romantic comedy with no sex and no swearing, and where all the single characters end up ... happily single? Happy endings for single people are a notion that popular culture has never warmed to.

Yet I feel hopeful that Pym’s star will rise again. Six years ago, the new editions by Moyer Bellbegan to appear in bookstores. Penguin Classics offers a new edition of Excellent Women (the cover design features an elegant potted orange tree—again, playing it safe with narrow target marketing). And the Internet, used bookstores, and libraries all offer readers the opportunity to find the other titles. Pym stalwarts have even adopted that tried-and-true Trekkie strategy: the annual conference. The Barbara Pym Society of North America—a group of Pym scholars and fans committed to raising awareness of the author—holds a two-day conference at Harvard each spring. (Past programs have included talks called “Unsuitable for Attachment: Men in Barbara Pym’s Life” and “The Excellent Woman: Subversion from Behind a Teacup.") Online discussion groups share favorite Pym passages and epigrams.

I read Pym for the dependable joy of her storytelling and also for the solace she offers during discouraging times: Barbara Pym, Patron Saint of Rejected Writers. Sometimes, when the rejection slips pile up, many of us may worry that our concerns are irrelevant or our ideas obsolete. But what can we do? Stop writing? On the BBC, Pym said, “I try to write what pleases and amuses me in the hope that a few others will like it too.”

Given this credo, how remarkable that her old-fashioned, tame work reached and so deeply touched me — a Gen-X gay man, in Chicago, in a very different-looking new millennium. What a miracle. It’s a reminder that artists have no way of knowing what will happen to the work we create — the fate of art is out of our hands. Yes, Pym had Philip Larkin; it helps to have famous and influential friends. Absent that, we can only write what amuses us, send it out and “try not to think about it,” visit a church bazaar, spy on our neighbors, and later, because we can and because it is so much fun (and because, after all, it’s only a matter of time), we write something new.

Books in this article, all by Barbara Pym:
Some Tame Gazelle (1950)
Excellent Women (1952)
A Glass of Blessings (1959)
No Fond Return Of Love (1961)
Quartet in Autumn (1977)
The Sweet Dove Died (1978)
A Few Green Leaves (1980)
An Unsuitable Attachment (1982)
A Very Private Eye (1984)
Civil to Strangers (1987)