It is now possible to describe a place, a situation or a person as ‘very Barbara Pym’. She is one of that small band of writers who have created a self-contained world, within which her characters move freely. This she achieved through her own personal, idiosyncratic view of life, expressed in a unique style. The development of that view and that style can be seen in the diaries, letters and notebooks which she left behind her, an incidental and eloquent commentary. After Barbara’s death in 1980, her sister Hilary and I (as her literary executor) received many requests for biographical information from scholars, in Britain and the United States, who were engaged in critical studies of her work, and it became apparent that an account of her life would be of value not only to them but also to those of her readers who simply wanted to know what she was like. But a conventional biography could hardly give a complete picture of Barbara; her shyness and reticence concealed much of the variety and complexity of her personality, even from those who had known her for many years. It was with some, excitement, then, that we realised, as we went through her papers, that there was ample material for Barbara to tell her own story.

From 1931, with occasional breaks, she kept full diaries, recording the events of her life and her reactions to them. These were written – and certainly preserved – to be read, and are, especially those written in 1943, finished pieces of writing. Everything she wrote was distinctively hers and it is delightful to watch her style develop. Nevertheless, we find in these writings the spontaneity which gives to all diaries their quality of immediacy.

After the war she gave up keeping a formal diary, writing instead in a series of small notebooks, from 1948 until her death in 1980. In them she recorded not only events but random thoughts and ideas for her novels, so that they are, in effect, working notebooks.

She was also an entertaining letter-writer and her correspondence fills in the gaps in the narrative and illuminates various aspects of her work. The zealous preservation of these letters, some written many years ago, by their recipients is some indication of their quality.

From this material, then, we have been able to produce a kind of autobiography, using Barbara’s own words and simply cutting and arranging it to form a coherent and continuous narrative.

The material fell naturally into three parts; the early years, mostly in Oxford – extrovert, full of naive enthusiasms; the more sombre and unhappy war years; and, finally, her life as a novelist, her success, her years of rejection, and her eventual reinstatement. For reasons of space and to avoid repetition, we have only used just over half the material. It is, however, all lodged in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (‘Wouldn’t it be marvellous if you could give all your love letters to the Bodleian and then go and read them 30 years later!’), and with it the manuscripts of her published and unpublished novels.

There are many references in the letters and notebooks to the characters and situations in her novels and parallels with her own experiences as well as her observations upon them. These will, of course, be of interest to scholars; but our main purpose has been to give to all who read and enjoy her novels another book by Barbara Pym.

The diaries will, I believe, come as something of a surprise to those who knew her only in her later life. I myself discovered aspects of her character that I had not known of in nearly 30 years of close friendship. I joined the staff of the International African Institute in 1950 and worked with Barbara for 25 years, for much of that time sharing a small office with her, editing monographs, seminar studies and articles and reviews for the Institute’s journal Africa. It was, in fact, Barbara who taught me the craft of editing.

Though her eyes I saw the whole richness of academic life – the extraordinary quirks and foibles of eccentric personalities and the bizarre quality of the jargon – while her comic extrapolations and inventions (the Indigent Anthropologists’ Food and Wine Fund, for example) made the earnest world of the Africanists a vastly entertaining place to inhabit. She infected me, too, with the fascination of finding out about people, and lunch times were often spent in public libraries, searching for clues in Crockford’s, Kelly’s Directories or street maps.

In the endless afternoons of office life and in our free time, we talked about her books and the characters she had created (what happened after Mildred had married Everard, what the original of Rocky had really been like) so that the world of the novels soon became as much a part of our lives as the real world.

In 1956, Barbara gave me the first draft of A Glass of Blessings to read and asked for my comments. I made some (largely technical) suggestions which she adopted and I read the proofs for her. I did the same for the rest of her novels, and she asked me to be her literary executor. When she realised that she would only just live long enough to complete A Few Green Leaves, she said that she knew that I, with Hilary’s help, would see it through the press for her.

From 1963 until 1977, when her work was not published, we discussed endlessly the reasons for this rejection. Her confidence was shaken and she only partially accepted the reassurances of her friends that it was the times that were out of joint and not her talents. But she never stopped writing, and there are several drafts of novels from this period. Her natural curiosity, her detective work, her ‘research into the lives of ordinary people’ continued, to become (especially in the notebooks) what the keeping of field notes is to an anthropologist.

Throughout these years she had the comfort and stability of a happy life with her sister Hilary, with whom she shared a home for most of her life. The domestic routine of Harriet and Belinda in Some Tame Gazelle gives a foretaste of what life was to be like in Brooksville Avenue or Barn Cottage and the affection and amity of the two sisters in the novel is a loving mirror of their relationship.

Even though she could no longer call herself a published novelist, Barbara had evolved a pleasant life, with her work at the Institute, a life ‘bounded by English literature and the Anglican church and small pleasures like sewing and choosing dress material for this uncertain summer’. But, as she had decided as far back as 1938, that I was not enough. With no real hope that it would ever be published, she wrote Quartet In Autumn ‘to please myself and a few friends’.

But, unlike so much of modern life and literature, there was to be a kind of happy ending. In 1977, both Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, chose her as one of the most underrated novelists of the century. Her literary reputation was restored, indeed enlarged. She was, and still is, sometimes compared with Jane Austen. Barbara herself regarded this as mildly blasphemous. Of a visit to Jane Austen’s house she wrote in her diary:

‘‘I put my hand down on Jane’s desk and bring it up covered with dust. Oh that some of her genius might rub off on me!”

She lived long enough to publish three more books and to have the pleasure of being shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

In her later years, Barbara took up the making of patchwork. The analogy with her novels is striking: each patch or incident is not only the best most representative piece of fabric, cut to precisely the right shape and fitted neatly into the whole, but it is also evocative of the source from which it is derived. Here then, in this book, are the original lengths of material from which she fashioned her novels.

Hazel Holt