A Very Private Eye: the diaries, letters and notebooks of Barbara Pym, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym. Panther paperback, 1985. First published 1984 I posted recently about friends who live nearby and have a lovely secret garden; one … Continue reading
Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle. Virago Modern Classics, 2012. First published 1950 Belinda Bede has loved the pompous, indolent Archdeacon of her local church, Henry Hoccleve, whom she first knew when they were undergraduates, for thirty years. But he married … Continue reading
Rohan Maitzen, an academic at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, who specialises in Victorian literature, wrote in her entertaining personal blog yesterday a piece about what she’s doing when ‘posting’ about rather than ‘reviewing’ books in her blog: Here, in … Continue reading
Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings. First published 1958. Virago Modern Classics paperback, 2011 Despite the surface triviality, there’s something else in Barbara Pym’s novels (links to my other posts at the end), a darker seriousness, a moral frailty or … Continue reading
Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence. Virago Modern Classics, 2007. 19531 There’s a particularly English kind of novel in which quietly ironic humour is the dominant tone. The irony in Jane and Prudence serves to create a critical view of a … Continue reading
Clergymen, spinsters and gossip: Barbara Pym, Crampton Hodnet. Virago Modern Classics, 2013. First published (posthumously) 1985 Miss Doggett is one of literature’s great bullies. Here’s how she’s first described – She was a large, formidable woman of seventy with thick … Continue reading
Back in February I wrote about Barbara Pym’s second novel, published in 1952: Excellent Women. No Fond Return of Love came four novels later in 1961. This was to be her final publication before the long hiatus caused largely by … Continue reading
Excellent Women was Barbara Pym’s second novel, published in 1952, but set, as a note on the MS indicates, in the year immediately after the end of WWII: London is a city still gripped by economic austerity, rationing is still in … Continue reading
Clare Chambers, Small Pleasures. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, paperback, 2021. First published 2020 I bought this for Mrs TD, who so enjoyed it she urged me to read it when she’d finished. I was less enthusiastic. I did enjoy the depiction … Continue reading
Emma Stonex, The Lamplighters. Picador hardback, 2021, 355 pp. This was another of the books I bought for Mrs TD for her recent birthday. After she’d read it she passed it on to her sister. They both had reservations about … Continue reading