Barbara Pym: Blue Plaque, Spying, & Bridge Coat

Barbara Pym: Blue Plaque, Spying, & Bridge Coat

 

 

An Academic Question by Barbara Pym

published 1986

 

Barbara Pym has been most splendidly in the news in the past week  - a heritage plaque was unveiled at one of her London addresses, to the delight of all her fans. (Pictures from Twitter) Great work by the Barbara Pym Society. (picture below is from their website). Lucy Worsley did the honours.

In addition, a question was raised about whether Pym had done some light spying for MI5 during WW2, when she worked as a censor.

Author Barbara Pym may have worked for MI5, research suggests | Books | The Guardian

We wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

In fact  a couple of us had a very niche response, because of our interest in another similar-era writer, Dorothy Bowers, much featured on the blog.

 

I was coming for Pym anyway, because of the recent blog obsession with bridge coats: she already strongly featured in my original post. Then I discovered a reference to a bridge coat in the late work An Academic Question published in 1986 after her death, assembled from drafts and notes by her friend, literary executor and biographer Hazel Holt.

Holt quotes the author in a note on the text: ‘Rather to my surprise,’ Barbara Pym wrote to her friend Philip Larkin in 1971, ‘I have nearly finished the first draft of another novel about a provincial university told by the youngish wife of a lecturer. It was supposed to be a sort of Margaret Drabble effort but of course it hasn’t turned out like that at all.’

So then, at a social event there is this wonderful conversation:

 

‘I almost prefer the women who haven’t made any effort at all, but have just taken out an old evening dress of the fifties or even earlier. There’s a sort of faded provincial grandeur about all that taffeta and lace and those “coatees”.’ He smiled at the word.

Dresses were much prettier in those days,’ Kitty lamented. ‘But I never thought green suited Dolly – goodness knows how old her dress is.’

None of us could hazard a guess, but I was sure that I had seen the black velvet bridge coat she wore over it among some of her ‘good’ jumble. It may even have come from the dead wife of one of Dolly’s old lovers.

 

Then I found that Margaret Drabble herself had reviewed the book in The Spectator (here, but behind a paywall):

“It is disconcerting to discover that a novelist a generation older than oneself has been trying to write ‘a sort of Margaret Drabble effort’. Naturally I was intrigued to know what she meant.”

And even better, Drabble says this:

The best character here is Dolly, an elderly protector of hedgehogs, who also sells jumble, and who turns up at a formal university occasion wearing a black velvet bridge coat which Caro speculates ‘may even have come from the dead wife of one of Dolly’s old lovers’. That line is pure Pym.

Drabble concludes ‘it is not vintage Pym’ and you would agree with that, but still good fun to read, and to see Pym looking at a younger heroine and the modern world.

And some great details. I have long been registering the history of stockings and tights in 20^th Century fiction, in the Guardian and on the blog – ‘the democratization of legwear’ is my phrase – and Pym came up with a new detail for me:

‘When one looks back to one’s girlhood,’ Dolly went on. ‘Kitty and I living here as young girls, going to dances and wearing flesh-coloured artificial silk stockings. Kitty used to have hers ironed to make them shiny. Such detail and now people wear nylon tights and we shall soon all be gone anyway.’

And another great blog favourite topic also featured:

‘She’s been knitting bed-jackets for the old ladies, Mrs Cranton has. I must show you – they’re really dainty.’… Miss Veitch was sitting up in bed wearing one of Menna Cranton’s bed-jackets, mauve, with matching ribbons.

Pym always does give nice background to clothes:

I looked in on Kate [her daughter] before we went out. One sometimes reads in Edwardian memoirs of a child retaining a romantic memory of its mother dressed to go out to a party, coming in to say good night. I wondered how Kate would remember me in my trouser suit which gave little scope for conventional glamour.

I found the party trouser suit hard to visualize  - maybe one of these from Vivat Vintage? BTW, nowadays I think 'trouser suit' would imply a blazer-style jacket on top, style based on a man's suit. But back in the day, a trouser suit was very much what is shown in this picture.

I am sure Dolly’s bridge coat looked nothing like the one here, but I really like the picture and didn't manage to use it in any of the previous posts.

The picture, The Blue Mandarin Coat by Joseph de Camp, can be found on Wikimedia Commons 

File:DeCamp Joseph The Blue Mandarin Coat.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Barbara Pym, Philip Larkin, bridge coats, bed jackets - all feature widely on the blog, see tags below.