All This Reading: The Literary World of Barbara Pym [Hardcover]

Frauke Elisabeth Lenckos (Author), Ellen J. Miller (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0838639569 | ISBN-13: 978-0838639566 | Publication Date: March 2003

Twenty-one years after her death, Barbara Pym's novels continue to be read and reread, discussed and debated by discerning readers. Her unique legacy is the world she created, one that is recognizably hers alone. These eighteen essays by noted scholars and critics examine the theme of reading in Pym's books. Through their various fresh approaches to the possibilities of readerly identification, a new and compellingly progressive image of Barbara Pym emerges that of an author engaged in an ongoing dialogue with those who consider reading a reciprocal act. The first part of the book examines the significance of reading in Pym works, both of her bookish heroines as well as for the author herself. The second part reveals literary encounters and collaborations in her life and works. The diversity and originality of these thoughtful contributions ensure a permanent place for Barbara Pym in twentieth-century literature.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Highly recommended. -- Choice, October 2003

The essays in this volume convince this reader that Pym stands up to comparison with her great forbears. -- Judy McInnis, University of Delaware

These essays are a felicitous union of the scholarly and personal. The standard of writing and scholarship is uniformly high. -- Canadian Woman Studies, January 2006

About the Author

Frauke Lenckos is an instructor in the Liberal Education for Adults Programs at the University of Chicago and the Newberry Library, Chicago. Ellen J. Miller is the Director of Publications at Harvard Law School.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Pr (March 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0838639569
• ISBN-13: 978-0838639566
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,652,328 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #31 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Books & Reading > History of Books

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A novelist with a very special quality, June 9, 2003

By 

C. Shuttleworth (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All This Reading: The Literary World of Barbara Pym (Hardcover)

In 1980, when Jane Nardin first came across the novels of Barbara Pym, as she remarks, `almost no literary criticism had yet been written' of Pym's work, while Dale Salwak, in his epilogue to All This Reading, records the `appearance since 1985 of twenty full-length book studies or anthologies, with more soon to arrive'. An extraordinary growth of interest, which is now further reflected in the publication of this stimulating collection of nineteen new essays. Part I examines the significance of reading in the novels; Part II is devoted to literary encounters and collaborations in Pym's life and works. Hazel Bell's index successfully draws together the threads running through the contributions by various hands, allowing the reader to trace, for example, references to spinsterhood in the essays of Frauke Elisabeth Lenckos, Katherine Anne Ackley, Barbara Everett, Helen Clare Taylor, Anthony Kaufman, Anne Pilgrim and Barbara Dunlap.

In attempts to pin down Pym's special quality as a novelist, she has been compared to, and with, a quite disparate list of writers, from Jane Austen to Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth von Arnim, E. M. Delafield and a whole host of other names, many listed by Lenckos in her introduction. Kaufman compares the rivalry of Belinda and Agatha in Some Tame Gazelle to the humour of E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia, and Everett commends Pym's `high originality' which sets her fiction `far above the intransigently reactionary ... Angela Thirkell'. Dunlap, tracing the influence on Pym of Charlotte M. Yonge, asserts that `Pym's fiction is steeped in the work of Yonge' (even the unusual name of the heroine of A Glass of Blessings, Wilmet, is borrowed from a very different heroine of Yonge's).

To what extent are Pym's novels autobiographical, and her well-read heroines reflections of herself? Orphia Jane Allen, writing on `Reading Pym Autobiographically', comments that `Pym was aware that she could permit herself to become like Leonora' (in The Sweet Dove Died), but Leonora represents only `one of the directions an aging, unmarried woman's life could take'. The most obvious incarnation of Pym's own personality is Belinda in Some Tame Gazelle, with her near-obsessive love of literary quotation. Pilgrim notes that, while Archdeacon Hoccleve and Bishop Grote quote aloud, sometimes not very felicitously, and Harriet `tends to be oblivious to literary references', Belinda `hardly ever quotes aloud, but silently recollects and meditates upon scores of passages, many of them quite obscure', and Nardin also finds significance in the fact that Belinda keeps her literary references to herself, `restrained by a sense of personal modesty and strict propriety at once pathological and deeply lovable'. In being made privy to Belinda's interior monologue, the reader is at the same time granted access to the author's own stream of consciousness.

As Ackley points out, Pym `often blurs the distinction between literature and life', suggesting in various ways that some of her characters have lives outside her fictional world. Dulcie in No Fond Return of Love, who cannot resist prying into people's lives, finds it `so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of others'. Pym's characters, says Ackley, `view the world as if they, too, were writers', and Nardin writes that `in Pym's novels, there is a tension between the impulse to read and the impulse to contextualize or interpret'.

The inner monologues of Pym's heroines reveal her own uncertainties and need for reassurance. Pilgrim comments on Belinda's habitual alternation between self-doubt, `expressed in her diffidence, timidity and constant anxiety', and self-confidence. Everett remarks on the unpretentiousness of Pym's early novels, and adds that the modesty of her approach `possibly worked to Pym's disadvantage during the period when her manuscripts were being rejected' and `makes her too easy to dismiss now'. Surveying the six earlier novels, she considers these thoroughly enjoyable but `probably minor art', while Quartet in Autumn is to her mind a major work. She finds Excellent Women the `most accomplished,... the most admirably competent', and has a kind word for An Unsuitable Attachment - it `has a first-rate cat and a wholly believable public library'.

These are only some examples of the many rich insights provided by All This Reading. Further pleasures are provided in the second part of the volume, such as the reproduction in the essay by Paul De Angelis of Pym's letters to him of 1978-9, almost up to the time of her death in January 1980, and of A Year in West Oxfordshire, Pym's contribution to Ronald Blythe's anthology Places of 1981.

Janice Rossen's essay, `Philip Larkin: Barbara Pym's Ideal Reader', discusses the crucial role played by `virtually the only fellow writer with whom she discussed her work in progress'. Larkin's influence and advice were clearly of great importance to her: not only was he able to give her very specific and practical advice, but he was a writer of established reputation who treated her as an equal and gave her `constant reassurances that her work was of extraordinary value'.

And not least, there is an account of thirty years of friendship and collaboration by Hazel Holt, Pym's literary executor, who tells us that she no longer reads Barbara Pym. `I don't need to. ...once you've read the novels, she is with you forever.'

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-have for Pym Fans and Bibliophiles, October 1, 2003

By 

N.K. Munson (Rockford, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All This Reading: The Literary World of Barbara Pym (Hardcover)

"All This Reading" is an essential addition to the libraries of Barbara Pym fans and an engaging introduction to Pym for new readers. The collection of essays features wise and sensitive insights into the theme of reading in Pym's books. Part I addresses this theme with a variety of topics, from "Love Like Bedsocks" to ". . . Metaphors of Aging and Death". Part II presents fascinating personal and literary encounters with Pym and her writing, including 'My First Reader' by Hazel Holt, Pym's long time friend and literary executor, and 'Barbara Pym as Comforter' by John Bayley, whose essay ends with a poignant personal note about the importance of Pym's novels to him and his wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999.

The expertly compiled index by Hazel Bell, in addition to serving as the indispensable tool for locating references and topics, provides an revealing look at the wide range of motifs and people mentioned by Pym and her readers, from anthropology to writers and writing, from Jane Austen to Charlotte Yonge.

This is a book to keep close at hand -- readers will find themselves dipping into it repeatedly for diversion, instruction, entertainment, and contemplation.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reading Barbara Pym, May 20, 2003

By 

Linda A. Relias "austen fan" (Wilmette, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All This Reading: The Literary World of Barbara Pym (Hardcover)

Eudora Welty found Pym's novels to be "quiet, paradoxical and sad." I think she described them perfectly. All this Reading explores the life, novels and publication of Pym. The book comprises a series of essays by many distinguised contributors. Educated at St. Hilda's college, Osford, she joined the Wrens during WWII and was posted to Naples. Her novels draw on her circle of college friends and her military life. Her writing highlights the theme "only connect" from Howard's End by Forster.
In Katherine Ackley's essay, she suggests Pym's characters are devoted to literature. They recite passages from an Austen novel or a Donne poem. Literature is a source of comfort to them. In John Bayley's essay, he further seees Pym as a comforter. He expands upon Matthew Arnold's theme that great art calms and comforts us, and he cites Pym as such a writer. Bayley notes that Pym's confidence about the sexes comes "from her sense of the arbitrary, almost ruthless, way they join up."
In "A Life Ruined by Literature", Elisabeth Lenckos argues that reading is a central theme in Pym's novels. The related topics of reading, romance and redemption are central in her novels. In A Few Green Leaves, the heroine Emma Howick recalls Austen's Emma. She stars in her own drama of misplaced affection, rejection and humiliation before leaving romantic fantasy behind. Lenckos suggests that Pym's world is like Austen's where the gentlewomen of reduced circumstances in post-war England have moved from manor houses to village cottages, and work part time in gentile jobs as librarians, clerks and social helpers.. "Like Austen's heroines their desire is to find a loving partner with whom to share life...." Those who love literature will find the nineteen essays in All this Reading satisfy every taste in a fine collection.