Barbara Pym

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym (2 June 1913 – 11 January 1980) was an English novelist. In the 1950s she published a series of social comedies, of which the best known are Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958). In 1977 her career was revived when the critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin both nominated her as the most under-rated writer of the century. Her novel Quartet in Autumn (1977) was nominated for the Booker Prize that year, and she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was born on 2 June 1913 in Oswestry, Shropshire. She was privately educated at Queen’s Park School, a girls' school in Oswestry. From the age of twelve, she attended Huyton College, near Liverpool. She went on to study English at St Hilda's College, Oxford.

During World War II she served in the Women's Royal Naval Service.

Pym worked at the International African Institute in London for seventeen years, beginning in 1946. She was the assistant editor for the scholarly journal, Africa. This inspired her use of anthropologists as characters in some of her novels. Like an anthropologist, Pym adopted the role of observer of human life.

After some years of submitting stories to women's magazines, she published her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, with Jonathan Cape in 1950. Thereafter she published eleven novels; two came out posthumously.

Pym's literary career is noteworthy for the long hiatus between 1963 and 1977. Despite early success and continuing popularity, her publisher Jonathan Cape rejected her manuscripts after 1961, considering her writing style old-fashioned. She approached other publishers, who also declined to publish her work. The turning point for Pym came with an influential article in 1977 in The Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent figures, the historian Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin, nominated her as "the most underrated writer of the 20th century". Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence for seventeen years, but even his influence had previously been of no use in getting her a new publishing contract.

...
Wikipedia