The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym
PAULA BYRNE
(William Collins, 704 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £20 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The novelist Barbara Pym’s personal diary is not necessarily the best guide to her life, given that she, like so many others, chiefly made entries “when I am depressed, like praying only when one is really in despair”. She had indeed cause for some unhappiness, mostly brought about by her way of going for darkly good-looking but ­second-rate men who had no intention of returning her precipitate passion.

Paula Byrne has drawn for the first time on the extensive Pym archive at the Bodleian Library. The 704 pages of her biography detail every romantic disappointment, and there were many, that Pym suffered after going up to Oxford aged 18. But so much space given over to this side of things does threaten to drown out the more positive aspects of her life. For Pym was also a supremely witty and understanding novelist. Her middle-class and middle-aged characters are no longer young, and fast on the way to becoming out of date as well as sometimes out of pocket. They reveal their minor flaws both in what they say and in how they say it. This is writing of the highest possible standard.