Cats, curates and cardigans

Anyone who has ever listened to the thump of a rejected manuscript descending cheerlessly on to the mat can take comfort from the roller-coaster career of Barbara Pym. Between 1950 and 1961 Miss Pym (1913–1980) had published six modestly successful novels with the firm of Jonathan Cape. Then, on 24 March 1963 — ‘a sobering fourth Sunday in Lent’, as Ann Allestree is careful to remind us — came a bolt from the skies, in the shape of a letter from Cape’s editorial director, Wren Howard, turning down the seventh with the age-old publisher’s bromide that ‘in present conditions we could not sell a sufficient number of copies to cover costs’.

There seems little doubt that this throwing over was the great trauma of Pym’s life, far more upsetting to her than the various relationships that punctuated her half-century of wistful spinsterdom, and a kind of King Charles’s Head to which she infallibly reverted in conversations with dinner guests or letters to literary chums.