Not quite getting to know her …

… The life and work of Barbara Pym - Claire Jarvis - Bookforum Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Byrne uses Pym’s fiction, primarily, to decode the novelist’s real-life romances. Her episodic approach offers a tidy chronology. We follow Barbara on her romantic peregrinations, touching on the Oxford of the 1930s, the life of a Wren in WWII, a single editrix’s life in postwar London. Byrne’s focus, perhaps shrewdly, is on a sort of sentimental eroticism. In her hands, Pym’s loves and flirtations—the moody, irritable, movie-star handsome Henry Harvey; the urbane, weak, married Gordon Glover; the Nazi officer Friedbert Glück, whom she romanced in Germany in the 1930s—are all snapshots of romance that is searching, urgent, and weirdly imbricated in political and social upheaval. But the major project of Pym’s life, turning the deeply mundane activities of a single woman in England into surprisingly complex novelistic art, falls somewhat by the wayside …