Barbara Pym: Some Tame Gazelle (1950)

My second Barbara Pym novel is in fact her first published, although it took many more years in the making, being begun sixteen years previously in 1934, when she was still at Oxford University. Several of her characters contain elements of people she knew at Oxford, and the main two characters, the confirmed fiftysomething spinsters Belinda and Harriet Bede, are a kind of premonition of Barbara and her sister Harriet's life together: they also lived in a village and were deeply steeped in social rituals revolving around the parish church.

As for some of the other inspirations:

– Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve is inspired by Henry Harvey. Pym met Harvey at Oxford and never forgot him: Belinda had 'loved the Archdeacon when she was twenty and [never] found anyone to replace him since'. The narrator adds 'with the years [Belinda's] passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling, more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning'. She admires his wife Agatha, and seems to prefer this marriage from a distance, by proxy.

– Radmila May notes that John Akenside, who died in a riot in Prague but is only mentioned in relation to Count Bianco, was inspired by her father John Barnicot, who incidentally wasn't killed in Prague, but had a Balkan connection as Akenside does, and whose physical description tallies.

– Count Bianco was inspired by Robert Weiss: May comments that Weiss was famous for unrequited love, and never forgave Pym for the description of Bianco repeatedly asking Harriet to marry him.

Pym's spinster sisters want not to get married far more than they want to get married, although there is something – which is surely deliberate, as if Pym is laughing at herself – ridiculous (partly because paradoxical) in their situation, in their being jealous about men they can't have and don't want. The whole thing seems to be a game that the women win (or at least don't lose), and usually, I think, the men are seen in a more ridiculous light than the women: Nathaniel Mold is upset by Harriet turning him down and resorts to drink; Bishop Theodore Grote is eager to be married, although he seems not too concerned to whom; and Henry delights in talking over people's heads and repeatedly quotes the same lines from Edward Young, as if he were a young schoolboy scoring points in a test of knowledge.

Literary quotations seem to be a prominent feature of Pym's novels, and they are often used to make an important generalising principal. In yet another humorous observation on spinsterhood, the narrator, speaking through Harriet and Belinda's thoughts, concludes:

'[W]ho would change a comfortable life of spinsterhood in a country parish, which always had its pale curate to be cherished, for the unknown trials of matrimony?'

 

Harriet remembers her sister

'saying something about people preferring to bear those ills they had, rather than flying to others that they knew not of'.

This, of course, is a slight misquotation from one of Hamlet's soliloquies, and is most apt: a more prosaic, proverbial rendering would be 'better the devil you know than the devil you don't.'

One of the oddest paragraphs, and one in which the virtual life of the sisters is again highlighted, is when Agatha is leaving for a holiday abroad on her own and the sisters take up 'their posts' at the window well before she is due to leave. They are obviously not only 'very confirmed spinsters', as Harriet later remarks, but confirmed curtain twitchers who love watching people come and go, and Agatha's leaving is something they have 'looked forward to [...] with an almost childish excitement'. Things of interest to them are the emotions shown on the occasion, what Agatha is wearing, how much luggage she has, etc. Self-parody this certainly is, although aren't such actions bound to evoke pity in the reader rather than amusement? Isn't it taking the proxy world of Belinda and Harriet (and by extension Barbara and Hilary) a little too far? Just a thought.

Barbara Pym: Excellent Women (1952)

Barbara Pym's Excellent Women depicts a world that revolves around spinsters, Anglo-Catholic rituals, anthropologists, church jumble sales, correct behaviour, suitable dress, bathroom sharing, and above all tea. As the above sentence may suggest, externally this is a world that has in some respects gone or is disappearing, one in which the church was all-important as a social focus and moral compass, when people had a 'Christian' name as opposed to a first or forename, when pubs were called 'public houses', when people frequently popped in to visit acquaintances and friends without prior arrangement – before the ubiquity of the telephone as a nervous tic, before the cultural anaesthesia of television.

 

Mildred Lathbury, a thirtyish spinster who works part time for the Society for the Care of Gentlewomen, is the protagonist and narrator. Her non-working life is wrapped up in church acivities, although the arrival of the anthropologist Helena Napier and her husband Rockingham, neither of whom are churchgoers and both of whom are very extroverted, soon bring a little colour to Mildred's existence. But perhaps this isn't what she really needs.

Mildred doesn't seem romantically interested in Father Julian Malory, nor in a man with whom she occasionally has lunch: William Caldicote, the priggish brother of her friend Dora. In fact she seems more interested in Rocky, who is of course unavailable because married. And here we perhaps have the crux of the issue: that Mildred may think about marriage from afar, but really isn't interested in it becoming a reality. Like Lolly Willowes in the first half of Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel of the same name, Mildred prefers to live life by proxy. As William tells her:

'We, my dear Mildred, are the observers of life.' In fact they do socially (or maybe more exactly, virtually) what Helena and her colleague Everard Bone do professionally.

Mildred herself says:

'I must not allow myself to have feelings, but must only observe the effects of other people's. [...] [P]erhaps I really enjoyed other people's lives more than my own.'

  

Mildred tells Dora – also a spinster – that there's no one she wants to marry, and Dora replies that she doesn't know anyone either 'at the moment', an expression that the narrator quietly picks up on and considers:

 

'It was a kind of fiction that we had always kept up, this not knowing anyone at the moment that we wanted to marry, as if there had been in the past and would be in the future.'

There certainly are moments of strong drama in the novel, such as Helena walking out on Rocky, or the young widow Alegra breaking off her engagement to Julian, but usually the actions are far more subtle, very understated, although at the same time sometimes apparently minor things (such as a teapot) carry great weight. When for instance Mildred asks Miss Stratham if they need a cup of tea, she interprets the effect of her question on her involving pain, puzzlement, distress, almost anger:

'It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind.'

Such a sentence – evidently self-parody – comforted me in the knowledge that Mildred was capable of laughing at herself to such a degree: this is almost absurdist territory. And I can see why Anne Tyler identifies with Pym's work, saying that she 'reminds us of the heartbreaking silliness of everyday life'. I can't wait to read more Pym novels.

Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)

This is a far from conventional spinster novel: it is deeply subversive, it screams anti-convention. Towards the end of the book the narrator suggests that protagonist Laura Willowes' nephew Titus is a 'proxy wooer', marrying Pandora when in fact the 'real match' is between Pandora and Lady Place, Titus's inherited home.

The word 'proxy' goes a long way towards an understanding of this work, because the unmarried Laura lives much of her life through others: after the death of her mother she's housekeeper to her father, and then after he dies it's taken for granted that she can probably have no life of her own (although she's still under thirty) and she goes to London to live with her brother Harry, his wife Caroline and her two nieces, one of whom accidentally causes the re-branding of Laura to 'Lolly'.

Early in her stay in London Harry and Caroline had nevertheless hoped to find a match for her among Harry's acquaintances in the legal profession, although Laura didn't tell them that she thinks '[t]heir jaws [are] like so many mouse-traps, baited with commonplaces'. However, they are surprised that she gets on well with Mr Arbuthnot, although marriage is far removed from Laura's ideas: she merely finds Mr Arbuthnot a little more human than the others because of his stammer. And then, after Mr Arbuthnot refers to February as a dangerous month Laura agrees, adding:

'If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.'

This is England in 1902 and we are in prim and proper upper-middle-class society, so the effect of such a frivolous – and slightly crazy – remark can be imagined. Some years later, in her late forties, Laura disturbs the family universe by deciding to leave her brother and family to live in the hamlet of Great Mop – a fictional creation, of course – in the Chilterns. There, in spite of the unwelcome and confused Titus briefly joining her, she finds a physical and a mental room of her own. A world of her own, in fact, because she makes a pact with the devil and becomes a witch:

'One doesn't become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It's to escape all that – to have a life of one's own, not to have an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day'.

This was Sylvia Townsend Warner's first novel, and it clearly heralded a fresh new voice in interwar fiction. It's not difficult either to see the demonic symbolism, that essential coding of difference, as a prototype of the coding used by other homosexual writers such as Rhys Davies, John Hampson, or Frank Sargeson.