Comparing Jane Austen and Barbara Pym
Female British Novelists with Similar Writing Styles
Aug 11, 2009
If that sounds like it is impossible to do, read Barbara Pym’s signature novel, Excellent Women, and read any of Jane Austen’s works, especially Emma, and the art of writing in a loving yet sarcastic tone will become clear.
Like Jane Austen, Barbara Pym (1913-1980) grew up in an idyllic, sylvan setting. Barbara Pym was born in Oswestry, a small market town in Shropshire, near Wales. In Barbara Pym’s time, provincial life was still neatly divided into specific social classes that knew their exact function and place in society.
Vicars, anthropologists, academic types, and single, somewhat lonely but overall contented women figure largely in Barbara Pym’s novels. Barbara Pym worked for years as editor of the magazine for the International African Institute. In fact, she worked all of her writing life and did not make a living off of her novels. Jane Austen, in the customs of her time for single women, lived at home with her family and helped with daily household functions, visited friends, and wrote her novels regularly interspersed with family activities and life requirements.
Personal Comparisons
Even though they lived in difference eras, there are a number of similarities between the lives of Barbara Pym and Jane Austen.
- Both writers had reliable support networks. Barbara Pym had a number of friends and one close colleague, Hazel Holt, who became her literary executor, and all read her manuscripts and offered feedback and critiques, supported her when she got good reviews and encouraged her in the years when her books were deemed “unpublishable.” Jane Austen’s family, especially, and secondarily, her circle of acquaintances provided her with a social network of loving supporters.
- Both writers were skilled. Jane Austen once proudly declared herself the most poorly educated female to ever call herself a novelist. Yet no one could deny her skill and insight into people’s actions and motives, and her ability to capture that on the page with wit that makes her writing to this day a joy to read. Barbara Pym, a humble woman who loved cats, also watched people and her surroundings keenly, and wrote about them in the pages of her novels and diaries. The Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard said of Barbara Pym: “What did one do, pre-Pym, with those observations and imaginings to which she has given a form?”
- Both writers were close to their sisters. Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra was the light of her life, the years showing that their relationship was perhaps closer and more important than any romantic affiliation ever could have been, as both sisters chose to stay single all of their lives. Barbara Pym and her sister Hilary shared a house together, and one can imagine them having tea, reading papers and magazines, doing sewing and embroidery and peering out their parlour window at the neighbours. A cozy image, indeed.
Comparisons in Writing
The two writers also shared a similarity in writing styles. Perhaps this was because they had similar personality traits, or perhaps Barbara Pym admired Jane Austen and worked to write like her. But simple mechanical copying alone cannot explain the subtle treasure of nuance through all of Barbara Pym's works.
- Both writers’ work types can be called comedies of manners. The website www.answers.com defines “comedies of manners” as “a comedy satirizing the attitudes and behavior of a particular social group, often of fashionable society.”
- Both writers studied human nature closely and wrote about life with a wry sense of humour. Jane Austen, for example, wrote to her sister Cassandra: “I will not say that your mulberry-trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.” Barbara Pym used to say to Hazel Holt, her co-worker, friend, and later, literary executor, when they were having lunch in a spartan, unappetising cafeteria setting: “We don’t ask much of life, it takes so little to make us happy – just liver and bacon and a seat on the banquette.”
- Both writers published in their lifetime. Jane Austen earned all of about six hundred pounds for her writing, originally published anonymously as simply “by A Lady.” Barbara Pym put her name on her works, and, after publishing several novels, suffered through a period when publishers told her there was no way her work would ever sell again. However, before she died, she did see her work being published again and her reputation as a writer established.
A Difference in Storyline
- Jane Austen’s heroines always won love in the end, despite having to go through various hardships on the way to finding that true love.
- However, Barbara Pym’s heroines did not always get the guy; in her novel Some Tame Gazelle, the handsome vicar was not married to the sweet heroine who followed him about the country and nursed a crush for him, but she ended up somehow content anyway. Barbara Pym’s women were a bit sadder, a bit more world-worn, than Jane Austen’s young, fresh heroines. Barbara Pym’s heroines more resembled Ann Eliot in Jane Austen’s later novel Persuasion.
Jane Austen definitely had an influence on Barbara Pym, who, in her turn, influenced later acclaimed novelists such as Shirley Hazzard and Peter Cameron.
There are many similarities between Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, both in their personal and their writing lives. Perhaps it was the fact that they remained unmarried all of their lives, or perhaps it was their wry perception, or their consummate skill with storytelling and characterisations, or all of these, but together they created a body of literature that provides for fresh insights, no matter how much it is read, and, as someone said of Barbara Pym’s books, which also apply to Jane Austen’s writings, they created “good books for a bad day.”
Sources:
A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym, by Hazel Holt, Penguin Group, 1990.
The Wicked Wit of Jane Austen, compiled by Dominique Enright, Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 2002, 2007.
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