While it was good to see John Dugdale's discussion of the Barbara Pym centenary (The week in books, 1 June ), it did give an impression of the writer as cosy and middlebrow, ending as it did with reference to a "Barbara Pym tea-bag rest". Like Jane Austen, Pym sometimes needs rescuing from her fans. As critics have shown, Pym's gifts include dispassionate irony, absurd humour, the depiction of London as a place of endless eccentricity, and a humanistic concern for the lives of the lonely. It has been suggested that she be compared to Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, who are far more appropriate than Miss Marple. At our Barbara Pym centenary conference at the University of Central Lancashire next month, international speakers will give papers on Pym's depiction of homosexuality, the cultural climate of the 1970s, and on textual links with TS Eliot, Philip Larkin, modernism and realism. There is far more to Barbara Pym than stories about jumble sales and clergymen.
Dr Nick Turner
University of Central Lancashire
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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