Barbara Pym and the Novel of Manners

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Barbara Pym and the Novel of Manners watches Barbara Pym tailoring the conventions of the novel of manners to reveal the curves of middle-class Britain. Drawing upon unpublished stories as well as the familiar novels, Annette Weld shows Pym wryly measuring her world to shape comic fiction from the fabric of personal experience. Pym turned a hawk-eye on post-war England and the resulting 12 novels are spare, bare-boned documenters of the taste, decorum, and social eccentricities she witnessed. Piling up the familiar details of daily existence - food, clothing and shelter, work and leisure, church and chit-chat - Pym creates social comedies that sometimes explore darker themes. Loneliness and rejection lurk underneath the laughter but so does resiliency, served up with an unarticulated feminism, an ironic wit, and a fondness for the foolishness of human beings.