大象传媒

Paula Byrne's joyous and illuminating biography of one of the 20th century's wittiest novelists.

Philip Larkin regarded her as the era's very own Jane Austen and yet today Barbara Pym is little known.

She lived through a period of social and political upheaval, and her novels charted the impact of these changes on women in the public and the domestic realms.

In the 1930s she went up to Oxford and spent time in Nazi Germany before the Second World War. In the 1950s, as a single woman, she went out to work and bore witness to the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

By the early 60s she had published six novels and, though she struggled for recognition from 1963 onwards, Pym continued to write and staged a triumphant comeback.

Her diaries are prefaced 'The Adventures of Miss Pym' emulating Henry Fielding's 'Tom Jones' and, in turn, bestselling author Paula Byrne has written her shrewdly observed biography of this courageous and funny novelist in the style of a picaresque adventure.

Omnibus of five parts abridged by Julian Wilkinson.

Read by Hattie Morahan.

Producer: Elizabeth Allard

First broadcast on 大象传媒 Radio 4 in April 2021.

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