The usual suspects | 3 May 2012

It is disconcerting to discover that a novelist a generation older than oneself has been trying to write ‘a sort of Margaret Drabble effort’, even if the book ‘hadn’t turned out like that at all’. This is how Barbara Pym described her then unpublished campus novel An Academic Question in 1971 to her friend and admirer Philip Larkin. Naturally I was intrigued to know what she meant.

Pym’s publishing history is well known: between 1950 and 1961 she published six  highly praised novels, and then ran up against a solid rock of refusals. Jonathan Cape dropped her, and she was told her work was out of fashion. Puzzled and down-hearted, she went on writing, somewhat hopelessly, because she couldn’t help it. What else was she to do with her observations, her time,
her talent?

Then, in 1977, she was rediscovered as suddenly and arbitrarily as she had been rejected, and a new if sadly brief period of success followed, launched by the remarkable Quartet in Autumn, an unsparing account of retirement, redundancy and old age, perhaps her finest work.