Barbara Pym
In 1977 her career was revived when the critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin both nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century.Pym's parents were active in the local Oswestry operatic society, and she was encouraged to write and be creative from a young age.While at Oxford, she developed a close friendship with the future novelist and literary critic Robert Liddell who would read her early works and provide key feedback.In the 1930s, she travelled to Germany on several occasions, developing a love for the country as well as a romantic relationship with a young Nazi officer, Friedbert Gluck.Although she initially admired Hitler and did not foresee the advent of war, she later recognised her "blind spot", and removed a character based on Gluck from the novel she was in the process of writing.The outbreak of World War II changed her plans, and in 1941 she went to work for the Censorship Department in Bristol, later joining the Women's Royal Naval Service.In her undergraduate days, they included Henry Harvey (a fellow Oxford student, who remained the love of her life)[10] and Rupert Gleadow.[14] Pym wrote her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, in 1935, but it was rejected by numerous publishers including Jonathan Cape and Gollancz.[16] After some years of submitting stories to women's magazines, Pym heavily revised Some Tame Gazelle, which this time was accepted by Jonathan Cape for publication in 1950.Nonetheless, it was positively reviewed in Tatler, the reviewer commenting: I love and admire Miss Pym's pussycat wit and profoundly unsoppy kindliness, and we may leave the deeply peculiar, face-saving, gently tormented English middle classes safely in her hands.In 1963, Pym submitted her seventh novel – An Unsuitable Attachment – to Cape.Pym was advised that her style of writing was old-fashioned, and that the public were no longer interested in books about small-town spinsters and vicars.On 21 January 1977, the Times Literary Supplement ran an article in which high-profile writers and academics listed their most underrated and overrated books or authors of the previous 75 years (the lifetime of the publication).Dutton secured the rights to all of her existing novels, starting with Excellent Women and Quartet in Autumn, and published her entire oeuvre between 1978 and 1987.[40] Pym was interviewed for an episode of Desert Island Discs on 1 August 1978, which was replayed on BBC Radio 4 Extra on 2 June 2013 – the centenary of her birth.Posthumously, Crampton Hodnet, An Academic Question and An Unsuitable Attachment were published, in conjunction with Pym's literary executor, the novelist Hazel Holt.The Barbara Pym Society also holds a spring meeting in London, and an annual North American conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.A superficial reading gives the impression that they are sketches of village or London life, and comedies of manners, studying the social activities connected with the Anglican church, Anglo-Catholic parishes in particular.The seemingly naive narrator Mildred Lathbury (Excellent Women), for example, actually engages in a kind of participant-observer form that represents a reaction to the structural functionalism of the Learned Society's focus on kinship diagrams.The answer is easy: they turn back to Barbara Pym.On 19 February 1992, the British television series Bookmark broadcast an episode entitled Miss Pym's Day Out, written and directed by James Runcie.The film follows Pym (played by Patricia Routledge) from dawn to evening on the day she attended the 1977 Booker Prize awards, for which Quartet in Autumn was nominated.