MixedLondon Review of Books (UK)\"Most of the pages are devoted to Pym’s youth and to fleshing out her love life. The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym is told in short breezy chapters with Fieldingesque titles ... Byrne convinced me that Pym loved and suffered. ‘Pouring out her heart’ in her novels may have been cathartic for her, even therapeutic. But writing was also a discipline where she put herself at arm’s length. As Byrne points out, she preserved her diaries with one eye on publication and knew when she was self-dramatizing ... Byrne’s own romanticism, in other words, sometimes gets the better of her ... This is a celebratory biography, but it reminded me how crucial and how costly it was for women of Pym’s class to observe what she called ‘behaviour’. The rules for a respectable woman were stringent...Biography is not usually so restrained.\
