The Making of Barbara Pym : Oxford, the War Years, and Post-war Austerity

The Making of Barbara Pym offers new insights into Pym's formative years as a writer, during which she honed a complex view of the necessity of change on individual and cultural levels. Supported by newly published archival material, this comprehensive study of Pym's early work explores her personal and fictional pre-war and wartime writing, including unpublished and posthumously published works, before looking closely at Some Tame Gazelle and Excellent Women, published during Britain's post-war austerity period. Of central importance is a new recognition of Pym's use of social roles, particularly those of women, as proper avenues for change. The book traces how Pym came to devise characters whose individual development can be seen as analogous to or representative of larger cultural movements. Pym uses the spinster figure to embody the forward-looking cultural perspectives that she endorsed and then, finally, in Jane and Prudence, to figure the end of Britain's austerity period. Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Elements of Continuity: Youth and the Oxford Years.- Chapter 3: The War Years: Surprising Continuities.- Chapter 4: Crampton Hodnet: The Continuous Cycle.- Chapter 5: Some Tame Gazelle: Continuity and Contentment.- Chapter 6: Excellent Women: A Continuous Role.- Chapter 7: Jane and Prudence: The End of Austerity. Emily Stockard is Associate Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, USA. A graduate of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she has taught classes in British literature, from Chaucer to the 18^th century. She has published on 16^th and 17^th-century poetry and drama and, most recently, on Denton Welch and Barbara Pym.