Felicity & Barbara Pym
I have been asked by the editor of Green Leaves, to write a short piece about the origins of my engagement with Barbara Pym’s work and the reason for writing Felicity & Barbara Pym.
When did I first encounter Barbara Pym? Honestly, I don’t know. I cannot remember my introduction to Miss Pym. I can remember our subsequent rendezvous, but not the first. I know where it occurred, however – in my favourite small independent bookshop, one of many scattered throughout the picturesque city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Housed in an early Victorian building, this tiny haven had an untidy explosion of books, a host of Pym titles, and an air of not really being there, a portent that it actually fulfilled by quietly disappearing some years later, much like the world of Barbara Pym.
I clearly remember buying my subsequent Pym books there so I imagine I purchased the first there as well. Oddly, I rather like not remembering my first purchase, since it now seems that Barbara Pym has always been a part of my life and remembering the first encounter might dispel that fancy. But why Pym?
Although I am often regarded as a scholar, I am not and what I will say next should be irrefutable proof. I am a writer. And a reader. I bought and read these books (many times) because I liked them. No other reason. I was not smitten with their verbal frugality or blazing characterisation. I wasn’t enamoured by their innovative treatment of time. I wasn’t intrigued by symbolic meaning. I just liked them. A lot. That’s all.
Later, much later, I was to discover, savour and investigate all those things, and more, though never in the manner of the theorist or critic. I am a literary writer. A fellow writer’s work engaged me for many reasons, some of them profound, and I appreciated that.
The answer to the second half of the request above is this: In its inception, Felicity & Barbara Pym, in a slightly different format, constituted part of my rigourous Master of Fine Arts degree requirement at Mills College in California, one of the few remaining private Liberal Arts colleges for women in America. In order to qualify for the MFA in Literature & Writing, (at that time, at least) one must both study literature and write a creative work. One’s thesis must give evidence of accomplishment in both. I thought that writing a creative work about the study of literature would be a fascinating way to demonstrate such accomplishment.
In thinking about how to go about this, I realized that I had inherited much of my literary philosophy from my own undergraduate tutor, Dr. Christopher Terry, who had been a student of FR Leavis at Cambridge and a literary exemplar to me two decades earlier. His great pedagogical/literary gift to me – the interrelatedness of all of literature, and the literary history and context I hold in my head – was something I wanted to pass on to my students with the conviction, passion, discipline with which I had been taught. I chose to centre this thesis around Barbara Pym, because by then, I had become deeply engaged with her work. I knew it well and saw that not many other academics did. As there was comparatively little written about her, I could fulfill one of the principle tenets of scholarship: to make an original contribution to Literary Studies. If I could illuminate the worth of this “obscure” author, to a very young and not very interested college student standing on the cusp of the 21st Century, in a creative work, I felt I would have earned the title of Master, which was about to be conferred on me. Felicity and Barbara Pym is what evolved.
This thesis was very well received, duly filed in the library, the MFA was conferred, and life went on, as one would expect.
What one did not expect is that ten years later, this dormant document would be resurrected in Wales, by publishers who loved it. Nor did I expect the outstanding reception it has received nor the unqualified approbation of Hazel Holt (whose books I had of course read and whose knowledge I revered) when Cinnamon Press, unbeknownst to me, asked her to write the Foreword. I did not expect that my fellow authors on the Red Room (a superlative society for writers and authors) would promote it with such enthusiasm, nor that academics would like it at all, much less commend it.
I’m delighted this is so, of course, and particularly gratified that only three weeks after its official debut in the UK, an American literary agency acquired the property to represent in the United States, so there will be an American edition of Felicity and Barbara Pym in the near future.
~ Harrison Solow, BA Hons, MFA, (PhD pending), in Green Leaves, the official publication of the Barbara Pym Society.
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