Apparently, the last novel of Pym’s I have to read was also the first novel she published in the UK. I basically have jumped around her “canon” and am now reading the first novel last. I was interested to see how her first novel would shape her career, and it’s filled with what would be considered her “trademark” in her novels. Some Tame Gazelle focuses on Belinda and Harriet, two fifty-something sisters who live together, unmarried. Belinda has languished in love–the object of 30 years’ […]
Humanity: less than angels.
I’m winding down to the last Pym novels in my library stack (and that she wrote) and feeling sort of melancholy that I can’t read her again for the first time. Ah, well. It’s the danger of binge-reading a new favorite author. I’m just glad I get to share her here on CBR (and hooray to those of you who are reading her!!!) Pym tackles anthropologists and academics again in Less Than Angels. Here, a love triangle emerges between Tom, a dissertating anthropologist, Catherine, a […]
Love and academia: two subjects ripe for examination
Yay! More Barbara Pym! Aren’t you all excited? [on a serious note, this was a delightful experiment, and I am *so* glad I was determined to “collect” her] This time, the “excellent woman” makes a reappearance and Dulcie Mainwaring (don’t you love the name?) is the protagonist. Shortly after her engagement ends, Dulcie attends an academic conference. There, she meets the wary and reserved Viola Dace, and becomes tangentially acquainted with scholar and presenter Aylwin Forbes. We learn that Viola had once had an affair […]
“Inanimate objects were often so much nicer than people.” Indeed, Miss Pym, indeed.
When I was growing up, my mom was a bit (really, that’s an understatement) of an Anglophile. She traveled to the UK annually, she watched Masterpiece Theater every Sunday night, she was always first in line at our local art house cinema for the new Merchant Ivory movie or a Miss Marple retrospective, she knew who Hugh Laurie was WAY before House, and she always surrounded herself with a pile of “quaint” British books. Authors like Agatha Christie, Jane Austen, EF Benson, Marion Chesney, James […]
The anthropology of small-town living
Surprise! Another Barbara Pym novel! This one has got to be one of my favorites, though. It deals with issues of perception and marriage, and sexual identity forms a huge part of society in this novel. Published a few months before Pym’s own death in 1980, this novel questions the status quo and is thoroughly modern in a way that even I did not expect of Pym. Emma Horwick is a 30-something anthropologist living in her mother’s cottage out in the country. There, she becomes […]
The horrors of spinsterhood (yes, this is a parody).
In the last post, I said I was taking a break from Barbara Pym to get through other books in my stack. Haha, JUST KIDDING. In truth, there was a bit of an emergency. Book Club is this Sunday, and I chose Excellent Women. The Chancellor has been borrowing my copy, and we both realized he would probably not be done in time for me to read it before Sunday. So…to the library I went and bypassed the other books on my nightstand. Excellent Women […]