Barbara Pym s early novel takes us into 1950s England, as seen through the funny, engaging, yearning eyes of a restless housewife
Wilmet Forsyth is bored. Bored with the everyday routine of her life. Bored with teatimes filled with local gossip. Bored with her husband, Rodney, a civil servant who dotes on her. But on her thirty-third birthday, Wilmet s conventional life takes a turn when she runs into the handsome brother of her close friend.Attractive and enigmatic, Piers Longridge is a mystery Wilmet is determined to solve. Rather than settling down, he lived in Portugal, then returned...

Barbara Pym affectionately skewers the charms, eccentricities, and secret yearnings of British middle-class life
Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates were close friends at Oxford University, but now live very different lives. Forty-one-year-old Jane lives in the country, is married to a vicar, has a daughter she adores, and lives a very proper life in a very proper English parish. Prudence, a year shy of thirty, lives in London, has an office job, and is self-sufficient and fiercely independent--until Jane decides her friend should be married. Jane has the perfect husband in mind for...

A tale of a woman s romantic entanglements with two anthropologists and the odd mating habits of humans from the author of Jane and Prudence.

Catherine Oliphant writes for women s magazines and lives comfortably with anthropologist Tom Mallow although she s starting to wonder if they ll ever get married. Then Tom drops his bombshell: He s leaving her for a nineteen-year-old student.

Though stunned by Tom s betrayal, Catherine quickly becomes fascinated by another anthropologist, Alaric Lydgate, a reclusive eccentric recently returned from Africa. As...

Three lonely people come together in this poignant and witty novel of thwarted dreams, scandalous secrets, and star-crossed romance
After being jilted by her fiance, Dulcie Mainwaring despairs of ever finding true love. For a distraction, she goes to a publishing conference, where she meets Viola Dace, a dramatic woman who refuses to live without romance, as well as Aylwin Forbes, an editor whom Viola adores. The fact that Aylwin is married doesn t stop Viola. When her amorous pursuit prompts Aylwin s wife to leave him, the academic heartthrob is wide open to Viola s romantic...

A novel of two sisters in postwar England that lets you "step into the Jane Austen-like lives of Harriet and Belinda Bede" (The Christian Science Monitor).
Belinda and Harriet Bede live together in a small English village. Shy, sensible Belinda has been secretly in love with Henry Hoccleve--the poetry-spouting, married archdeacon of their church--for thirty years. Belinda's much more confident, forthright younger sister Harriet, meanwhile, is ardently pursued by Count Ricardo Bianco. Although she has turned down every marriageable man who proposes, Harriet still welcomes...

Caro is the wife of Dr. Alan Grimstone, a lecturer at a provincial university in a West Country town in England. She knows her circle believes that she should be doing more with her life. She is the mother of a young daughter but relieved to be able to leave the girl in the care of an au pair. Her one selfless act--reading aloud to a former missionary at a rest home--is sullied when she allows her husband to 'borrow' some of the old gentleman's papers in order to get the better of a colleague. Caro's sister is a social worker disinclined towards marriage and children, but is she happy?...

Thanks to his wife's money, Adam Marsh-Gibbon leads a charmed life writing poetry and novels celebrated mostly by his fellow residents in the town of Up Callow in Shropshire, England. His lovely wife Cassandra caters to his every whim, although perhaps not as enthusiastically as five years earlier, when she first married her handsome yet difficult and unappreciative husband. Into their lives steps Mr. Stefan Tilos, the new tenant of Holmwood, a dashing Hungarian who puts the whole town in a flutter. How alarming then, that he should become so visibly enamoured of Cassandra. Mrs. Marsh-Gibbon...

Shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize

This is the story of four people in late middle-age - Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia - whose chief point of contact is that they work in the same office and they suffer the same problem - loneliness. Lovingly, poignantly, satirically and with much humour, Pym conducts us through their small lives and the facade they erect to defend themselves against the outside world. There is nevertheless an obstinate optimism in her characters, allowing them in their different ways to win through to a kind of hope. Barbara Pym's sensitive wit and artistry...

'Could one write a book based on one's diaries over thirty years? I certainly have enough material, ' wrote Barbara Pym. This book, selected from the diaries, notebooks and letters of this much loved novelist to form a continuous narrative, is indeed a unique autobiography, providing a privileged insight into a writer's mind.
Philip Larkin wrote that Barbara Pym had 'a unique eye and ear for the small poignancies of everyday life'. Her autobiography amply demonstrates this, as it traces her life from exuberant times at Oxford in the thirties, through the war when, scarred by an unhappy...