Serpents in suburbia

Barbara Pym was never just a cosy writer. She could be barbed and sour — and seriously, hilariously funny. Kate Saunders, in her introduction to Pym’s last novel, explains how

‘Rather to my surprise,’ Barbara Pym wrote to her friend Philip Larkin in 1971, ‘I have nearly finished the first draft of another novel about a provincial university told by the youngish wife of a lecturer. It was supposed to be a sort of Margaret Drabble effort, but of course it hasn’t turned out like that at all.’

The novel was An Academic Question — witty, sharp, light as a syllabub, nothing like anything by Margaret Drabble and with a cast of typically Pym-like English eccentrics. There is Kitty Jeffreys, who commanded an army of servants on a Caribbean island until the locals unfeelingly elected an all-black government and forced her into exile. Her son, Coco, is a fastidious bachelor with a passion for gossip; her sister, Dolly, runs a ramshackle secondhand bookshop and obsessively tends hedgehogs.