As you may know, it is now Barbara Pym Reading Week. Hosted by Thomas at My Porch, this promises to be a great week for reviews of this wonderful writer. I really meant to join in properly but life has run away with me and I haven't had time for any Pymming. But I have in the past posted a couple of reviews so here's one, originally posted in 2007.
Jane and Prudence were walking in the college garden before dinner. Their conversation came in excited little bursts, for Oxford is very lovely in midsummer, and the glimpses of gray towers through the trees and the river at their side moved them to reminiscences of happier days.
'Ah, those delphiniums', sighed Jane. 'I always used to think Nicholas's eyes were just that color. But I suppose a middle-aged man - and he is that now, poor darling - can't have delphinium-blue eyes'.
'Those white roses always remind me of Laurence', said Prudence, continuing on her own line. 'Once I remember him coming to call for me and picking me a white rose - and Miss Birkinshaw saw him from her window! It was like Beauty and the Beast', she added, 'Not that Laurence was ugly. I always thought him rather attractive'.
'But you were certainly Beauty, Prue', said Jane warmly. 'Oh, those days of wine and roses! They are not long'.
'And to think that we didn't really appreciate wine', said Prudence. 'How innocent we were then and how happy'.
What a great opening for a novel! Like all the best opening pages, this one encapsulates so much that is going to be important later. Oxford, of course, where Jane and Prudence met, Jane as a young tutor and Prudence as her student. Two Oxford-educated women doing what most Oxford-educated women probably ended up doing in the 1950s -- Jane married to a vicar and Prudence doing literary hack-work for Dr Grampian, "some kind of an economist or historian" who writes "the kind of books that nobody could be expected to read". We know so much already about these two just from this opening conversation -- Jane still devoted, in a sort of quietly wifely way, to her vicar, Prudence the beauty, nostalgic for past romances. Jane's habit of literary quotation is here, and so is Prudence's more worldly perspective as she takes literally the metaphorical wine in Jane's quotation.
Barbara Pym's books really ought to be sad. "None of us has really fulfilled our early promise", says Jane, who once published a book of essays on an obscure 17th-century poet but now has no time to pursue her research. Prudence, too, has "got into the habit of preferring unsatisfactory love affairs". But there is a sort of pragmatism in Pym, which is one of the ways in which she resembles Jane Austen. Neither author is a revolutionary feminist -- both recognize the constricting and sometimes stifling conditions that society imposes on their heroines -- but both show their women exercising their sharp and clever minds within the social limits they have to work in. Much of the comedy in Jane and Prudence comes from the discrepancy between Jane's role as a vicar's wife and her lively, witty, wide-ranging mind, which is always leading her to make unsuitable remarks and bewilder her listeners, who as often as not are her husband's parishoners.
'Unfortunately, it is rather a modern cathedral', said one of the clerical wives, 'and there is one of the canons I do not care for myself'.
'But I've never thought of myself as caring for canons', said Jane rather wildly.
'One man's canon might be another woman's...' began another clerical wife, but her sentence trailed off unhappily, giving an effect almost of impropriety which was not made any better by Jane saying gaily, 'I can promise you there will be nothing like that!' .