You might wonder: what the mid-20th century British author of “cosy” fiction could possibly have in common with Kafka? I'm here to tell you: quite a lot, it turns out.
Barbara Pym would most likely be shelved under “Humor,” “Domestic Comedy,” or “Social Comedy of Manners.” Hers is a world of teapots, jumble sales, and vicars’ wives; her audiobook narrators give the same comforting hush you'll hear in Jane Austen and Elizabeth Taylor — the novelist, not the movie star. Imagine always coming second when someone Googles you. Look her up and "underrated" immediately comes up several times — the same word so often used of Barbara Pym. Coincidence? I think not.
And yet to leave her there, gently satirizing the strained manners of the middle-class Anglican spinster, writing books largely without plot, is to miss the quiet brilliance, and the profound emotional violence, of her work. I say emotional violence because she affected me so deeply.
The brutally ugly conditions beneath the tidy surface of the genteel, civilized world she so lovingly skewered still hold true. In a society ruled by tradition and an unquestioned patriarchy, women over a certain age — especially those without children — effectively become invisible. They occupy precarious positions. Their words fall on deaf ears. But make no mistake, they still have things to say!
A Kafkaesque Crisis in the Parish Hall
Furthermore, the worlds her characters inhabit are closed systems — hermetically sealed, intensely suffocating. Gossiping, fake friendship, being the abused hired companion to a more genteel lady... we're just little cogs in a big meaningless machine. Kafka would understand that condition all too well. That resignation and futility. He traps his own characters in just such enclosures and opaque labyrinths. If Kafka's men are crushed by law, guilt, and abstraction, Pym’s ladies are crushed by polite society, social smallness, and an unrelenting expectation that they keep on smiling.
While her prose speaks in sotto voce, my dudes, I hear screaming. A hostess nervously laughing at awkward social moments? What I’m actually hearing is the muffled screaming of existential despair.
“We must always look a little ahead,” says Mildred Lathbury in Excellent Women. “It is better, I think, to look ahead and be happy than to look back and be sad.” Yes. Are you examining your little life, and finding it sad? Then simply do not examine it. Think forward, to tomorrow's grocery shopping. Besides, it’s not very polite to complain, and perhaps a sign of self-importance.
It must be the gravest sin in England, appearing self-important.
Invisible Women and Institutional Loneliness
Pym wrote about women the world refused to see: unmarried, unremarkable, nearing or past 30 — an age at which females are to be either securely married or narratively discarded. Pym's heroines continue to live after the main line of the plot has passed them by. They are often clergy-adjacent, underemployed, intelligent, and made to feel mildly ridiculous for it.
These women are not tragic in the dramatic sense. They are not Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. They play important roles — in their small communities. Their pain is smaller, but more insidious. And they must always remain polite about it.
In A Glass of Blessings, the narrator Wilmet discovers — almost accidentally — that her husband once had an affair. I can never decide whether it was physical or maybe just an emotional affair? He’s just so blasé about it! His confession arrives casually, like the passing mention of a forgotten errand. And Wilmet — shocked, yes; hurt, probably — does not rage: she fucking. Stirs. Her. Tea.
In An Academic Question, a woman uses her feminine social networking skills to work at an old folk’s home, where steals a dead old academic's life's work, so that her husband can plagarize it. She spends most of the novel worrying about putting it back, and procrastinating.
There are countless other situations in Pym where a wife’s domestic labor duties include typing her husbands’ work. Women write the indexes, carrying the burden of reading what is probably the most boring (and not at all materially useful) academic material imaginable, writing out the index cards, sorting them, spreading them out on the carpet. It's taken for granted that the male characters are totally helpless, like children. They literally can't feed or clothe themselves. These are the other moments Pym is at her most devastating: when the women realize that even their labor — intellectual, emotional, domestic — is invisible. And must remain so.
An Anglican Beckett?
There is a kind of hysterical containment in Pym's novels — where humor is not a release, but a mask. Laughter becomes a form of polite survival. Her heroines do not cry in public. They over-polish the brasses.
If Beckett’s characters are waiting for Godot, Pym’s are waiting for an eligible clergyman to glance at them twice in the church hall. To choose their home to come over for Sunday dinner, and eat the chicken smothered in white sauce. Both kinds of waiting are absurd. Both end in silence.
But unlike Beckett, Pym never sheds civility. Her absurdity is embroidered with tea cozies and Latin quotations. Her horror is made gentler by floral curtains and good manners. There’s endless poetry and learned quotations. But is that enough? I would say not. I would suggest that a good deal of the frustration leaks through, coming in the form of neurosis. One constant question in all of Pym's novels is, what is the appropriate thing to do right now? The question is forever in the air, to the point of being distracting, nerve-wracking, anxiety-inducing. If I'm not mistaken, Kafka himself suffered from this affliction.
Her Own Story—Dismissed, Then Resurrected
Perhaps the most Kafkaesque twist of all is what happened to Pym herself. After a string of beautifully crafted novels in the 1950s and early '60s, she was dropped by her publisher. Her fiction was deemed too old-fashioned, too quiet. She continued to write but was unpublished for 16 years.
It was only when Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil named her the most underrated writer of the century in a Times Literary Supplement article (1977) that she was “rediscovered.” (Because again, women do not exist until men recognize and discover them.) Quartet in Autumn, her bleakest and most brilliant novel, was published that year and nominated for the Booker Prize.
But the literary establishment's earlier rejection had already broken something in her. She died three years later, of breast cancer — the increased risk of which is faced by women who delay or forgo motherhood. While she did not leave progeny behind, The Barbara Pym Society goes on strong to this day.
Her world of jumble sales and church meetings and disappointing love affairs might seem small, but it contains multitudes. Like Jane Austen, she found the universal in the particular, the profound in the everyday. And her understated observations are so cutting.
Every time I read Pym, I'm struck by how contemporary she feels. Her women are navigating careers and relationships, independence and loneliness, in ways that feel utterly relevant to me. She was writing feminist literature before anyone called it that — just by taking women's experiences, even the very smallest ones, seriously and writing about them with intelligence, wit, grace. And faith.
That's the one place, I think, where Pym and Kafka really couldn't be more divergent: he's spiritually homeless. You could always find her in churches and churches in her work. Hymns were a genuine thing of beauty to her.
Until next time, I remain devoted — to excellent women everywhere.
