June 2, 2025
Happy Birthday, Barbara Pym
It was 12 years ago today that I baked a Victoria sponge cake in honour of Barbara Pym’s centenary, and also because I was almost 42 weeks pregnant and had time on my hands. I went into labour shortly thereafter, which would have made for a better story had my labour not subsequently stalled with my baby born three days later by c-section instead of the home birth we’d planned with a shared birthday with the extraordinary Miss Pym. But Pym having a day of her own is most fitting, in retrospect, and I’m rereading all her novels this year just to be reminded of this (before my own Barbara Pym-inspired novel is published early next year!). This weekend I reread Jane & Prudence, her third novel, which received mixed reviews upon publication in 1953, and as I was reading the first two thirds, I was all set to explain how this was a second-rate Pym novel (her characters are a little too silly, it’s a reworking of a novel she’d written in the 1930s and perhaps less fresh for that, the set-up is artificial) but then at some point the novel won over entirely and I loved it as much as I loved everything Pym wrote. It’s an Emma-aware story of matchmaking gone awry, so-called matchmaker in question Jane, an unconventional vicar’s wife (she’s got an Oxford degree and no affinity for domestic tasks), who tries to arrange a relationship between her former student, 29-year-old Prudence, and her new neighbour in the village she and her husband have just moved to, the perhaps dastardly widower Fabian Driver. But then fate has other plans. Jane & Prudence is not the place to start with Pym, but the novel is not to be missed either.
