When I was eighteen and first temping in London, I became desperately homesick for the countryside where I’d been brought up. Seeking solace in Westminster Public Library during a very cold wet lunch hour, I took out a novel with a dreary brown jacket called Jane and Prudence and fell totally in love. The gentle but wonderfully funny evocations of office and village life were so like the London I was experiencing and the Yorkshire I was missing that I couldn’t bear to return the book. Very shamingly I lied to the library that I had lost Jane and Prudence (who must have sounded like two flatmates) on the bus and was made to pay a 7/6 fine. It was the best 7/6 I ever spent. Gradually over the years I have collected all Barbara Pym’s novels, and never ceased to laugh, marvel and be moved every time I read them.

A Very Private Eye is a joy – a real Pym’s fruit cup, in which Barbara’s letters and extracts from her diaries have been beautifully edited by two people who loved her. If you don’t know her other books this ‘unique autobiography’ will make you rush to read them, if you already do, you will sit saying: ah yes, of course, ah yes, as you realize how the people she met and the things that happened to her were woven into such subtle glowing tapestries in her novels.

With this key, as Wordsworth said of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Barbara unlocked her heart. Anyone who believed she was a gentle spinster whose life revolved round the parish is in for a shock. In A Very Private Eye we discover Barbara as a very attractive woman with a jazzy love life having her heart broken by several glamorous young men, but most of all by the publisher who cruelly rejected her novels for sixteen years.

One really wanted to cheer at the 22 January 1977 entry which records her being rediscovered in the Times Literary Supplement by Larkin and Lord David Cecil. And one cheers even more when on 14 February 1977, better than any valentine, she received a telephone call from her present publishers, saying they wished to take on her newest novel, thus enabling her to enjoy a brief Indian Summer of fame before her tragically early death in 1980.

In 1979, I went to the Authors of the Year party given by Hatchards on the top floor of New Zealand House. It was like landing on Mount Olympus. Not only was there a heavenly view of London gilded by the evening sun, but all one’s literary gods seemed to be present.

In fact I was so over-excited by all the stars I met that it was only as I was leaving that I noticed two sweet-faced pretty women standing happily together, quietly drinking in the party, observing everything – like true writers. Then they smiled at me, and I realized they were Barbara and her sister Hilary – and I’d squandered the entire party on other people. They were so friendly and cheerful, no one could have believed Barbara’s inoperable tumour had just been diagnosed. We only talked for a couple of minutes. But like my 7/ 6 library book, I would not have exchanged that moment for the world.

JULY COOPER, 1994