It sometimes seems there are two schools of enjoyable fiction. In one, the fate of the world hangs in the balance: There’s running and shooting on the low-brow end of this spectrum, and scheming and ...

One reaches page 388 of Paula Byrne’s new biography, “The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym” (HarperCollins), before the subject’s career as a published novelist begins. It appears to end on page 482, ...

If you are familiar with the quiet little gems that are the novels of Barbara Pym, you may be surprised by the number and intensity of the writer’s love affairs—all doomed. Paula Byrne brings these ...

There's a passage in Barbara Pym's "Jane and Prudence" that always makes me smile. After Jane Cleveland's husband is installed as vicar in a village church, Jane is introduced to a Miss Doggett, a ...

THE ADVENTURES OF MISS BARBARA PYM. By Paula Byrne. William Collins. 704 pages. $34.99. Even the most passionate of Barbara Pym fans may be hard-pressed to explain why they find her writing so ...

“You’ll see it’s exactly like her novels. Everyone here is from their pages,” Laura Shapiro said, when I told her that this was my first time at the Barbara Pym Society’s annual North American ...

Ellie Wood, the producer behind Netflix film The Dig, has struck a development deal with Banijay UK and is working an adaptation of Barbara Pym’s ‘Excellent Women’ novels. Under terms of the agreement ...

This fall, my husband and I braved country roads and their harrowing roundabouts to make a literary pilgrimage to the tiny town of Finstock in Oxfordshire, England, to see … what? Barn Cottage, the ...

There can be few literary comebacks more satisfying than that of Barbara Pym. In the 1950s and early 1960s she published six novels, stories about ordinary women, often single, books that revel in the ...