The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym – Paula Byrne (2021)

I have been a Barbara Pym fan for some years now so when I first began seeing mention of this new biography on social media, I knew I would have to read it as soon as it was available.

Jacqui of Jacquiwine’s journal has already reviewed this book in two excellent posts – I fear I don’t have the energy to write two posts about a book, though this book is fully deserving of such attention. There is so much to talk about with this wonderful book – but I am going to assume that lots of you will be reading this soon – if you’re not already and so I will try not to get too carried away.

I don’t always engage so well with non-fiction, but this book has a wonderfully readable narrative. Immediately engaging; each chapter a little vignette from Pym’s life with chapter titles such as Miss Pym’s Summer of Love, Miss Pym tours Germany and An Untoward Incident on the River urging us to read on.

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym takes its title from Pym’s own diaries which she prefaced – The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym. It seems clear from Pym’s own treatment of her diaries and letters – what she destroyed and those she didn’t – that she always had one eye on posterity. Of course, this isn’t the first biography to have been written about Barbara Pym, in 1990 Hazel Holt published A Lot to Ask, and six years earlier A Very Private Eye an autobiography in letters and diaries edited by Barbara Pym her sister Hilary and Hazel Holt had been published. In my review of that book, I spoke about the revealing nature of letters and diaries that had been first written without thought of publication in mind – having now read Paula Byrne’s fascinating and illuminating biography, I have to say I think Barbara Pym always had an eye on publication. I first read A Lot to Ask in 2010 so it is perhaps unsurprising that I couldn’t remember a lot of detail, I then read A very Private Eye in 2013. I think I had retained enough memory of those books to be unsurprised by some of the things Byrne’s book reveals. However, I think it is clear that Hazel Holt sought to protect her (by that time deceased) friend from certain revelations – and so looking back on that biography now, I think we have to see it as being an incomplete picture. This book I believe gives us a true picture of Barbara Pym, it is both honest and deeply affectionate – and I liked Barbara Pym the woman much better for it.

Paula Byrne takes us back to Pym’s upbringing in Oswestry, Shropshire where she was born in 1913 to Frederic and Irena, her father a solicitor her mother the very model of the excellent women with which we associate Pym.

In 1931 Barbara Pym went to St Hilda’s college Oxford to read English – it was a life changing experience for her, she fell in love with Oxford and found it a very inspiring and stimulating environment.

“Pym went up in the autumn of 1931. In her mind, Oxford would always be associated with that season; the smell of woodsmoke and the picking of wild berries. It was also a place to be forever associated with romance, teeming as it was with young men, dressed not exactly in fancy dress, but in scholars’ sweeping black gowns.”

It was here that Barbara began to form some very important relationships, she was never short of male attention, and as we come to see she fell in love easily, and very hard – liked sex and was unapologetic about it. Her first sexual experience however seems to have been traumatic in some way, and this was definitely one of the things Pym edited from her life, removing the relevant passages from her diary. However, more love affairs followed, Henry Harvey in particular was a big part of her life at Oxford and after. Sadly, Henry was to let Barbara down – and so began a pattern that would last the rest of her life. Falling in love with men who were either unsuitable or unavailable.

One particular section of the book which might surprise some Pym fans are the chapters which focus on Pym’s fascination with Germany. I found it an especially engrossing part of the book. In 1934 Barbara Pym went to Germany with the student’s union – having already started learning to speak German. Like many Britons of this period – Barbara was beguiled by everything the Nazi propaganda machine was pumping out. Her interest was non-political. She was attracted by the German culture, art, music, and landscape. We must remember that England in the 1930s was in a bit of a mess – the Nazi party was quite deliberately presenting Germany to the rest of the world as some sort of promised land – and Barbara fell for it. Later, she clearly had begun to have doubts and she may well have ignored things she really shouldn’t have – but by then she was head over heels in love with Friedbert Glück a handsome SS officer who was quite close to Hitler.

“Pym was thrilled when she caught sight of ‘real Nazis.’ One of them was called Friedbert Glück and he was wearing the black uniform of the SS. The other men wore the brown shirts with the swastika armband of the Stormtroopers (SA).”

We can’t judge the actions of a young woman in the 1930s with 21^st century sensibilities, we weren’t there – we don’t really know how we may have acted had we been born then. It is clear that later Barbara Pym bitterly regretted her naivete and saw her later war work with the ARP and the Wrens as some small reparation for her error.

All this was happening around the time that she first started writing Some Tame Gazelle – which interestingly originally had quite a lot of German content in it. Later Pym removed every German and Nazi reference in the novel on the advice of her good friend Jock Liddell. Had Chatto and Windus accepted the novel when it was first sent to them in the mid-1930s, it would be a quite different book to the one we know now.  

Of course, Some Tame Gazelle was finally published in 1950, and paved the way for five more novels – all of which were popular and provided Barbara Pym with a legion of loyal fans. Byrne discusses Pym’s writing and each of the novels brilliantly, with the affection that comes from a dedicated fan. We then sense the sadness and the frustration of those often discussed wilderness years – and her drive to keep writing even when all seemed hopeless. Throughout her life, Barbara had a wonderful relationship with her sister Hilary, who she set up home with when Hilary was widowed. Men came and went; work was at the International African Institute in London. Everything she experienced in her life was rich material for her writing, which remained hugely important throughout her life. Then comes the glorious intervention of Phillip Larkin, and a late renaissance and the publication of her remaining books.

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym is a wonderful biography, revealing and honest and really compelling. I have already written far too much – I apologise for such a long post – but I really could have written a lot more.