In this deeply affectionate biography, Paula Byrne claims her as a 'cult author' but that doesn’t seem quite right. Pym is no one’s idea of a well-kept secret. Although she is frequently described, not least by Byrne, as a modern Jane Austen, in fact her work is far closer to Elizabeth Gaskell in her Cranford days ... In this excellent – a word that always carried extra heft in Pym’s universe – biography Byrne explores how her art emerged from three distinct yet porous registers of experience ... Although Pym’s archive has already been well picked over by scholars and fans, Byrne’s book is the first to integrate its revelations into a cradle-to-grave biography. She gives a seamless timeline of Pym’s life ... Byrne doesn’t dodge the uncomfortable implication that Pym’s phase as a Nazi sympathiser (she even had a swastika pin that she wore around Oxford) went on longer than most middle-class Britons in the 1930s, but she is clear too how completely it was bound up with Pym’s feelings for prewar Germany as a land of music, mountains and philosophy and, above all, as a crucial bulwark against the terrifying threat of communism from Russia ... Oddly, though, Byrne does not delve very deeply into the less toxic business of why Pym had such a masochistic habit of going after men who were either gay or already committed to prettier or socially smarter women.
Like many of Pym’s novels, Paula Byrne’s superb new biography of the author illustrates the limitations, challenges and opportunities faced by educated single women in the 20th century ... The Pym who comes to life in this engaging and ultimately moving book is a woman who was sometimes brave and sometimes morally blind, a romantic who had a sense of the absurdity of romance but for whom dreams could overcome common sense, a woman who faced the challenges of growing older as a single woman with courage, a woman with the gift of keeping lifelong friends. 'Incidentally, people may be very untame inwardly – one can seldom know,' Pym wrote in her diary in 1933. As this exemplary biography shows, that was definitely true of Miss Barbara Pym.
Byrne is an engaging writer...Despite its bulk, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym skips easily along in bite-size chapters; it aims to rollick, and rollick it does ... In its willingness to present its subject’s less appealing side, Byrne’s improves on the previous biographies, a cottage industry of Pymiana maintained by her friends and family. And Byrne is good at filling in some of the contemporary context that informed her life and work. But as with the earlier books, Byrne’s main source is the Pym trove at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. It is a huge resource — decades of journals, notebooks, drafts and letters — but also a hindrance: Where the author is silent, Byrne is reduced to silence, too. Seemingly important events, like the death of Pym’s mother, are dispatched in a sentence. Much is read into lacunae in the record: When Pym expurgates her diaries at emotional moments, Byrne must hazard guesses at the precise reasons ... the longest and most significant relationship of Pym’s life, with her younger sister Hilary, gets fairly scant attention — even though the two lived together for decades. Pym’s long career at the International African Institute, which gave her abundant material for her novels, is hardly discussed; and not much consideration is given to her faith...The books, too, get curiously short shrift, with more plot summary than critical assessment ... For devotees of Pym’s novels, ardent if not legion, Byrne’s book will be a welcome companion. For more casual fans, its appeal may be more limited. Pym led an interesting life, but Byrne’s expansive approach means it is nearly 400 pages before she publishes her first novel. And while she never wrote an autobiography, Pym infused herself — as Byrne ably shows — into her own canon, which remains the best way to meet her. Even Barbara was apt to note the slippages between life and art.
... engrossing ... It’s a tribute to Byrne’s clear-eyed and thorough but warm-hearted approach to Pym that we don’t hold that unsavoury episode against her ... Prepare yourself for a long read. Byrne presents Pym’s life story in the picaresque style of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones: 124 chapters with titles such as 'In which our Heroine sees Friedbert for the Last Time' and 'In which Miss Pym leaves Pimlico for Barnes'. Byrne justifies this comic-epic format by suggesting that Pym 'spent a lot of time in love' and 'on the road'. I’m not sure about the on the road part: for 28 years she held down the same editorial job in central London, not going anywhere much except to join the dwindling congregation at St Laurence’s, Brondesbury until it closed in 1971 ... The chapters are enticingly short, though, and I romped through them. Each adds a vital piece of the jigsaw, explaining the provenance of her fictional characters and building up our understanding of the state of mind of the person who wrote the late masterpieces ... It’s a delight to meet her again in these pages.
There is much more to know about Pym’s own life than her churchgoing and her love affairs, doomed or otherwise. Byrne, an experienced biographer, has resurrected Pym and her milieu. Writers such as the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett make appearances, alongside more quotidian events, complemented by Byrne’s astute notes on the detailed parallels between her subject’s life and her fiction ... Byrne’s book is outstanding, but she has not been well served by her publisher: the UK hardback jacket is unappealing, featuring an unflattering photograph of Pym. Do not be put off: appearances, as we know from any Pym novel, are deceptive ... Pym’s gift for life-long friendships is, ultimately, what shines through ... Just like a Pym novel, this biography is warm, funny, unexpected — and deeply moving. I defy any reader not to cry. Quietly, of course.
... a fatter, bolder affair. Its judgments are mostly sound, but for all its heft there’s something headlong about it. The arch titles of its short chapters ('In which Miss Pym is sent away to Boarding School') make no tonal sense. Whatever fantasy exercises Pym may have indulged in, it is hardly apt 'to imagine her life as a picaresque adventure, with a Fieldingesque narrative,' as Byrne insists on doing. The dust-jacket photograph of a young Barbara Pym sitting on a rock is even cropped in such a way that she appears to be taking a pratfall.
... wonderfully attentive and touching ... A woman’s life: what an odd and lovely thing it is, but how hard to change perceptions of the way it may be seen by others. Byrne’s book is good on the work, and it moves through the necessary facts as smoothly as a spoon through homemade jam. Its greatest achievement, however, lies in something at once more vital and more nebulous: her deep kinship with her subject’s excitable, unbridled heart. Those who think of Pym as the human equivalent of a winceyette nightie should smarten up their ideas. The pink suspender belt isn’t the half of it ... No wonder Byrne’s book is such a joy. It refreshes the parts other biographies simply cannot reach.
Ms. Byrne, the author of two novels, as well as books, on Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh, among others, gives us a work that surpasses in length and detail the two previous book-length accounts of Pym’s life ... Indeed, the most fascinating aspect and true strength of this very long biography is how completely Ms. Byrne shows that Pym’s life and fiction were part of a piece, and lets us see how she transferred facets of herself to her leading characters. Though different in age and material circumstance, these characters are all recognizably Pym-ish ... a long, exceedingly detailed book—too detailed, as Ms. Byrne appears to have been shackled to Pym’s journals and their record of important matters, but also of having tea, changing clothes, seeing friends off on the train, going shopping, having more tea, facts which add nothing to our appreciation of Pym or her work. But it is also a truly revealing work about a paradoxical writer, a woman who put bits of herself into her characters and yet was not really like them at all.
Byrne’s account of Pym’s life is hugely readable, clearly and sensitively summarizing the novels. Chapters are appealingly short....This framing device perpetuates Pym’s own self-protective clowning: always the jolly one, hiding behind her jokes and her alter egos ... Byrne quotes lavishly, which means we are treated to many of Pym’s lovely one-liners ... But there are some unsettling omissions. There is no serious discussion of Pym’s relationship with religion, despite the fact that the majority of her early novels involve ecclesiastical settings, and Pym herself once moved house in order to be close to a particular church. We hear little about Hilary, the sister with whom Pym lived for over thirty years. I longed for more detail about her composition methods and her sales figures. And a fascinating, disturbing extended episode in the late 1950s is simply dropped mid-story.
... light-hearted and lively ... Like her creations, Pym was definitely not rock and roll, but she was certainly more ambitious and multifaceted than the teapots and cats suggest; Byrne knows this and conveys it with a light touch in this entertaining book.
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.
... detailed, definitive ... Byrne is brilliant in her descriptions of Pym's relationships: with her sister Hilary, whom she predicted in her first novel she'd grow old with, and did; the Oxford friends and flames she kept all her life; and Philip Larkin, her greatest supporter, though they didn't meet in person for 15 years. Byrne's accounts of the novels will add to anyone’s reading list, and longtime fans will want to revisit her oeuvre—as Larkin and other friends did, several times ... Infused with the high spirit and humor of its subject, a gift to fans, novices, and aspiring writers. Pym would be thrilled.
Byrne captures in this insightful biography the life of British author Barbara Pym (1913–1980), drawing extensively on Pym’s correspondence, diaries, and notebooks to illustrate how her novels reflected the social and political changes of her era. Byrne vividly recounts Pym’s childhood in rural Shropshire, her transformative years at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, in the 1930s, where there were strict rules governing women’s behavior, and WWII, when she 'flirted with Nazism' ... This attentive, lively biography casts a well-deserved spotlight on a writer whose 'reputation is secure, but only among a minority of readers.'
