Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym was born in 1913 in Oswestry, Shropshire, and studied English at St Hilda's College, Oxford. During the Second World War she served in the Women's Royal Naval Service, including a posting in Naples. Afterward she worked for many years at the International African Institute in London, helping to edit its journal. Her novels are gentle social comedies about the lives of clergy, churchgoers, academics and unmarried women in English towns and London parishes. Excellent Women (1952), narrated by Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman's daughter who is always helping others, is often considered her best. After several successful books, her publisher rejected her work in 1963 as old-fashioned, and for years she could not find a publisher. In 1977 the critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin both named her one of the most underrated writers of the century, and her novel Quartet in Autumn was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She died in Oxfordshire in 1980.

Barbara Pym is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: An Anglican whose novels center on Church of England parish life. Source: Wikipedia