Barbara Pym
born June 2, 1913, Oswestry, Shropshire,
Eng.
died Jan. 11, 1980, Oxford
English novelist, a recorder of post-World
War II upper middle-class life, whose
elegant and satiric comedies of manners are
marked by poignant observation and
psychological insight.
Pym was educated at Huyton College,
Liverpool, and at St. Hilda’s College,
Oxford. She worked for the International
African Institute in London from 1946 until
she retired in 1974 and edited the
anthropological journal Africa for more than
20 years. In her novels Pym rejected overt
drama and emotionalism and instead chose to
depict the quiet, uneventful surface of her
characters’ lives in order to describe human
loneliness and the corresponding impulse to
love. Her works include Some Tame Gazelle
(1950), Excellent Women (1952), A Glass of
Blessings (1958), Quartet in Autumn (1977),
and The Sweet Dove Died (1978). A Few Green
Leaves (1980) and An Unsuitable Attachment
(1982) were published posthumously, as was A
Very Private Eye (1984)—her diaries and
letters edited as an autobiography.
