| Barbara
Pym |
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| Nationality - English |
Profession - Author |
| Date of birth - 02 Jun 1913
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Date of death - 1980 |
| Place of birth
- Oswestry : Shropshire |
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Barbara Pym was born on June 2, 1913, in the small town of Oswestry, Shropshire, on the Welsh border.
At the age of sixteen, inspired by Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, Barbara attempted her first novel, "Young Men in Fancy Dress," a work that remains in the Pym Archives at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.
After earning her degree in English Literature, Barbara returned to Oswestry where she began writing Some Tame Gazelle about two fiftyish spinsters. Remarkably, she projected herself and Hilary thirty years in the future, wove her Oxford friends into the story, and further refined the Pym style, marked by wit, humor and delightful details of her characters' everyday life.
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Barbara completed this first novel in 1935 at age 22 and periodically submitted it to publishers, but without initial success.
Barbara started other stories and novels in the 1930s, notably Crampton Hodnet, which was published posthumously.
When war overtook Europe in 1940, Barbara was assigned to the Censorship office at Bristol and after a painful romance, she decided to join the Wrens (Women's Royal Naval Service).
In 1944, she was posted to Naples until the end of the war. There she continued writing her diaries and notebooks, gathering material for the "stuff" of her novels. One of the naval officers she knew in Naples became the inspiration for Rocky Napier in Excellent Women.
After the war, Barbara took a job at the International African Institute in London, and soon became the assistant editor for the journal Africa. Here the world of anthropologists provided rich and amusing fodder for Barbara's comedic pen. During this time, Barbara lived with her sister Hilary, now with the BBC, in a Pimlico flat where she wrote stories for women's magazines, but without success. More significantly, she revised Some Tame Gazelle and submitted it to the publisher Jonathan Cape in 1949. To her delight it was accepted and published in 1950, to favorable reviews. Her career as a published writer was launched.
From then on every few years a new Pym novel was produced. Excellent Women was published by Cape in 1952, followed the next year by Jane and Prudence.
Two years after her modest success as a writer, in 1963, Barbara submitted An Unsuitable Attachment to Jonathan Cape, her publisher; to her dismay, it was rejected as being out of step with the times. This was, of course, a severe blow. She tried sending it to other publishers, only to have it rejected. She thendecided to revise it, but still it was rejected. In all, twenty publishers refused to publish her latest novel.
In 1971 Barbara was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy; in 1974 she suffered a minor stroke. She then retired from the Institute and went to live with Hilary at her cottage in Finstock,
Barbara Pym died at the Michael Sobell House, a hospice in Oxford, on January 11, 1980. She is buried in the churchyard at Finstock. |
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Barbara Pym
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