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Summary: A must-have for Pym Fans and Bibliophiles
Review: "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.
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Summary: A novelist with a very special quality
Review: 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.'
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Summary: in praise of "All This Reading"
Review: In my opinion "All This Reading" is the best collection of essays written about Barbara Pym to date. The articles are all well written and full with insights, yet are diverse in their apprach. As a doctorate student writing a dissertation on Barbara Pym I find the articles very useful For example it was illuminating to read two totally opposing, but well thought of, views by John Bayley and Ellie Wymard,regarding
Pym's attitude to organized religion. Yet, the essays are general and interesting enough for any one who is interested in Barbara Pym.
I highly recommend "All This Reading". Orna Raz
Israel
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