Anyone who knows me knows I am all.about.that.Jane (with apologies to Megan Trainor, whose twee song I am now appropriating). So of course when Alexander McCall Smith announced at the book signing I attended in November 2013 that he was writing a contemporary adaptation of Emma, I was excited. Very excited. Smith is an Austen acolyte, and also incidentally, that of Barbara Pym, as well (and one of the people who recommended her to me in the first place). For the record, Mr. McCall Smith […]
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 […]
Sexism and the home/workplace in Barbara Pym
Okay, I am about to take a Pym break to get through some other books in the stack, but I will leave you for now with A Glass of Blessings, which looks at some common themes and ideas that Pym has worked through in her canon. Wilmet Forsyth is a bored housewife. Her husband Rodney is a civil servant who is married to his work. They live with his mother Sybil, an attentive but independent companion. She becomes involved with her local parish and invests […]
Another delightful takedown of academia
Hey, look, another Barbara Pym review from me! I clearly went overboard two library trips ago. Or was it three? I don’t know. I have such a HUGE STACK that I need to get through that the books are starting to blur together. Gah. I really want to up my reading game, but now that the weather is so nice, everyone wants to get together. Oh, well. It’s very Pym-ish to be doing things with people. 🙂 This time, An Academic Question turns its focus […]
More Barbara Pym. More hijinks.
If you haven’t guessed, I’ve been going through a Barbara Pym phase these days. It’s been a lot of fun to read novels that are seemingly of “another time” and yet have some delicious biting commentary on human nature that is still relevant today. Plus, Pym has an incisive wit reminiscent of Jane Austen’s. Her novels are highly readable and very engrossing.This novel certainly does not stray from this successful formula. An Unsuitable Attachment follows a parish in urban London, where the poor Caribbean immigrants […]
The sweet dove is not as innocent as it seems.
Some of the popular perceptions of Barbara Pym, from the selected academic criticism I’ve read, are that she’s fusty and outdated, or that she is very chaste. Apparently, none of these academics read The Sweet Dove Died, because sexuality is a HUGE aspect of this novel of manners. In so many ways. Leonora Eyre is a woman of middle-age (we assume), who decides to attend an antique auction and bid on a book herself, much to the dismay of the highly proper antique owner Humphrey, […]