This novel was rejected by Barbara Pym's publisher, in the early 60s. Perhaps it didn't seem in tune with the times. Pym took it back and reworked parts of it, and it was eventually published after her death, when she'd regained her popularity. However, it seems unfinished. She revealed that she originally made John "much worse", but in her world that might mean that he wore a corduroy suit, or dropped more H's. The romance between John and Ianthe is understated, but what she gives us goes straight to the heart.
John is a former film extra who goes to work in Ianthe's library, where they are overseen by the waspish Mervyn. Ianthe, a spinster in her late 30s, attracts interest from some unlikely men. Mervyn is probably gay, but covets her inherited furniture. Rupert Stonebird thinks Ianthe would look so perfect in his house.
Ianthe inherits some money, and buys a cute little house in a London suburb that has definitely not gentrified - yet. As a clergyman's niece, she is welcome by the local vicar and his wife, Sophia, and cat, Faustina.
Sophia thinks Rupert will do for her jilted sister, who is "modern" in an early 60s fashion, wearing a "beehive" hairdo and sometimes a hat like a yellow tulle soufflé.
Everyone agrees that John is an "unsuitable" partner for Ianthe, and the words suitable/unsuitable pepper the text.
There is a local vet and his sister who act as a Greek chorus. And women tend to wear tweeds.
Lady Selvedge and Mrs Grandison set off to open a bazaar, stopping only to consume a "lunch of Welsh rarebit and trifle at a café run by gentlewomen. Class is frequently expressed through food:
‘We have come to this,’ her mother used to say, ‘eating frozen vegetables like Americans.’
In about ten years from the date of the novel, feminism happened and girls pretended that marriage and pairing off were about to disappear from the face of the earth. But this idiocy has not happened yet.
Penelope had now reached the age when one starts looking for a husband rather more systematically than one does at nineteen or even at twenty-one.
Matchmaking Sophia probes "to find out without actually asking whether he had a mother, wife, fiancée, or ‘friend’ in the background".
Everyone values Ianthe for her apparent class. Sophia's mother notes her "feather-trimmed hat which had just the right touch of slightly dowdy elegance".
Ianthe goes looking for her retired former colleague Miss Grimes, and finds her living in one room in a house of multiple occupation with many bellpushes by the front door, and a hall laid with "frayed chocolate brown linoleum".
It's Daisy, the vet's sister, who notes the bromides people wheel out when anyone's ill. "Perhaps others didn’t feel they could give in to it as I did.’ ‘No, they felt it their duty to struggle on,’ said Daisy, half to herself.
The gang go on holiday to Italy, and Sophia takes the opportunity to tell Ianthe that there are alternatives to marriage: good works, being a pillar of the Christian community. But, cries Ianthe, "Mustn’t all these things be a second best? Oh, not to God – I know what you’re going to say."
‘Well, some books are destined never to be read,’ said Mervyn. ‘It’s the natural order of things.’ Like the women who are destined never to marry, thought Ianthe, remembering Sophia’s words to her in the gardens at Ravello. There had been something almost cruel in the way she had spoken.
When Ianthe goes so far as to announce her engagement in the times, Sophia wails: ‘I wanted her to stay as she was, almost as if I’d created her.’
There are other details that nail this book to a time and a place (and publishers never like that unless the time is 1550): Ianthe wears a "white orlon cardigan" over her summer dress and the tourists are delighted to discover "osso buco" and spaghetti, not to mention Tuscan red wine.
Authors are often sold as exemplars of "subtle humour" that presumably has to be mined for. This humour, as well as being unfunny, is usually "mild" or "gentle". Pym's humour really is subtle, and neither mild nor gentle. It's no coincidence that, as so often, anthropologists form a background. Their papers of "jural processes among the Ngumi" don't promise to tell us anything much.
"Meeting people in everyday life in north-west London isn’t quite the same as studying a primitive community in Africa", protests Rupert. But by the end of the book he's joking that his next book is going to be called The Wiles of Nice Women in a Civilised Society. And what is this book if not...?
Sophia is revealed as a manipulative woman who has never loved anybody apart from her horrible cat, with whom she is obsessed. (I see Faustina as a Persian with a cross expression.) However, the whole book seems a little unfinished. Sophia's marriage, the lives of the well-meaning vets, are glossed over, hinted at. Another writer (especially one writing today) would make a meal of them, and underline the significant points. Pym just glances at them. Perhaps that's her cleverness.
More here, and links to the rest.
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