This was Pym’s first novel.  She started it in 1934 and worked on it fitfully until it was published, after several rejections, in 1950.

It grew from an adroit, mocking, literary conceit; what lives would her sister, herself, and their friends be living in their middle age?

She casts herself and her sister as spinsters – Belinda and Harriet - living together (which indeed happened) in a small village, and their friends and beaus as various clergymen and residents.

Belinda has long been in love with the local Archdeacon, now married to someone else and Harriet, the more vivacious of the two, dotes on the latest in a series of young curates, while declining age-appropriate marriage proposals. Various comings and goings provide a possibility of disturbing change…

This first book sets out Pym’s stall quite clearly; her novels are genteel social comedies set in fairly closed communities and mine the frictions kindled when personalities and ambitions conflict.

This book made me laugh out loud so many times. The humour is gentle, in that it’s not broad, farce, or slapstick, but it carries weight and makes points about the effects of individual behaviours within these communities that resonate as a sharp-eyed understanding of the affairs of wider society and human-nature in general.

Pym writes such precise, warm, prose, revealing the richness of her characterisations with perfectly judged dialogue and thoughts.

When her career stalled in the sixties Pym’s novels were seen as old hat and out of touch.  In the late Seventies, with the support of Philip Larkin among others, Pym was able to resume her career very successfully in the few years left to her.

Larkin had presumably recognised what we find in Pym’s books now, an often melancholy, sympathetic, contemplation of hope, duty, and love, and the joys and despairs of little lives, presented in a light, comic, style which lets her blade slide in so much more easily.

I always love spending time in her company.