[In the following excerpt, Updike comments on Pym's writing career and offers a favorable assessment of Excellent Women and Quartet in Autumn.]

Atomic aloneness in a crowded world, where life is cheap and its accidents random, can be better felt in the wanly Christian world of Barbara Pym. This English novelist has had a disheartening career. After publishing six deceptively old-fashioned novels between 1950 and 1961, she was spurned by more than twenty publishers and understandably let her pen languish. From 1946 to 1974, she supported herself as an assistant editor for the quarterly Africa. As retirement approached, however, she began to write again, a novel "as churchy as I wished to make it," and in January of 1977 her name appeared in the Times Literary Supplement as the heroine of a poll taken to determine the most underrated British writer of the last seventy-five years. Her new novel, Quartet in Autumn, was accepted by Macmillan, and two of her old books were reissued by Jonathan Cape, with commercial and critical success. Now, in this country, a novel dating from 1952. Excellent Women, has been published for the first time, along with Quartet in Autumn, by Dutton. An unfortunate effect of such simultaneous exposure is to reveal, of two books written over twenty years apart, how alike they are, even to striking, on the last page, the identical muted chord. More fortunately, the reader who has consumed both novels in a few days can report that the older is very fine, and the newer even finer—stronger, sadder, funnier, bolder.

It would be hard to imagine a more timid world than that of Excellent Women, or a novel wherein closer to nothing happens. Miss Pym has been compared to Jane Austen, yet there is a virile country health in the Austen novels, and some vivid marital prospects for her blooming heroines. "Excellent women" is a phrase used by a parson of the drab little flock of spinsters who cling for company and amusement to the threadbare routines of his London church. An American who has never attended an Anglican church in London can scarcely conceive of the extreme of sad attenuation to which ecclesiastical institutions can be reduced while still holding open their doors; I can recall a noble structure on Albany Street in which one bright Sunday morning this lone overseas visitor composed a full third of the congregation. Father Julian Malory's St. Mary's Church, in a shabby district on "the 'wrong' side of Victoria Station," seems a shade more bustling than that, but only a shade. Our heroine, Mildred Lathbury, the unmarried daughter of a rural clergyman, comes to it because it is relatively "High" and burns incense, which her deceased parents would have deplored. "But perhaps it was only natural that I should want to rebel against my upbringing, even if only in such a harmless way." All her rebellions and outward motions are similarly circumspect, but within the limits of her quiet life as she firmly draws them minor excitements loom in scale, and excite us proportionally. Mildred Lathbury is one of the last (I would imagine) of the great narrating English virgins, and though she tells us she is "not at all like Jane Eyre," her tale has some of the power of, say, the portion of "Bleak House" narrated by Esther Summerson—the power, that is, of virtue, with its artistic complement of perfect moral pitch and crystalline discriminations. The postwar, protoconsumerist London that Mildred depicts, wherein jam seems still to be rationed and rubble still lies in church aisles, yet wherein couples drink wine and separate with a certain liberated ease, is an awkward arena for her discriminations, perhaps. One of the funniest scenes, though brief, occurs when she attempts to buy a new lipstick and can scarcely bring herself to name the tint she wants: "'It's called Hawaiian Fire,' I mumbled, feeling rather foolish, for it had not occurred to me that I should have to say it out loud." The urban crush of modern London is, she reflects, in a phrase that echoes a T. S. Eliot echo of Dante, a hard place for the practice of Christian charity:

"One wouldn't believe there could be so many people," I said, "and one must love them all." These are our neighbours, I thought, looking round at the clerks and students and typists and elderly eccentrics, bent over their dishes and newspapers.

The plot's turns have to do with new neighbors. A young couple, Helena and Rockingham Napier, move into the flat below Mildred's, and conduct within earshot a typical but sufficiently unsettling modern marriage. And Father Malory and his unmarried sister Winifred take in a boarder, one Mrs. Gray, with romantic consequences that titillate every corner of the tiny parish, from jumble sale to Evensong. Mildred, at the nubile age of "just over thirty," seems remarkably spinsterish. Her sexual experiences have been of the daintiest sort, and she puzzles over the "race of men" and their differences from women with the polite quizzicalness of an anthropologist from the moon.

"I like food," I said, "but I suppose on the whole women don't make such a business of living as men do."

Men in bowler hats, with dispatch cases so flat and neat it seemed impossible that they could contain anything at all, and neatly rolled umbrellas, ran with undignified haste and jostled against me. Some carried little bundles or parcels, offerings to their wives perhaps or a surprise for supper. I imagined them piling into the green trains, opening their evening papers, doing the crossword, not speaking to each other …

"Of course, men don't tend to be alone, do they?"

It is fitting that an actual anthropologist, the humorless but upright (and Christian!) Everard Bone, adds himself to the exiguous list of Mildred Lathbury's male friends—her pastor, his curate, a few neighbors, and an old friend so set in his ways he complains, "They've moved me to a new office and I don't like it at all. Different pigeons come to the windows." At the book's romantic climax, Everard Bone invites her to be his indexer; but Americans, with their Freudian and Lawrentian prejudices, should not hasten to bid farewell to her chastity and hello to "what Helena called 'a full life.'" Mildred has involved herself with men enough to enhance her feeling of possibility, her sense of choice, but what she chooses, out of sight of the novel's conclusion, may well be more of the same. "As I moved about the kitchen getting out china and cutlery, I thought, not for the first time, how pleasant it was to be living alone." "Excellent women" need not think of themselves as "the rejected ones." When warned not to expect too much, Mildred thinks, "I forbore to remark that women like me really expected very little—nothing, almost." Excellent Women, arriving on these shores in a heyday of sexual hype, is a startling reminder that solitude may be chosen, and that a lively, full novel can be constructed entirely within the precincts of that regressive virtue, feminine patience.

By the time of Quartet in Autumn, the lonely women are ready for retirement. There are two of them: Marcia Ivory, in whom Mildred Lathbury's self-sufficient aspect has been carried to the point of loony reclusiveness, and Letty Crowe, in whom Mildred's amiable side has developed into a clothes-conscious, food-loving softness bordering upon the hedonistic. Marcia and Letty work in a nameless office in the same room with two single men—Norman, small and wiry and irritable, and Edwin, large and bald and churchgoing. Edwin is the only one of the quartet who has ever been married and who appears to be an active Christian; the churchly ambience of Excellent Women has shrunk to this one merry widower, who shops around from church to church for services as a species of entertainment. The shadow of religious shelter has been lifted from Miss Pym's world, and the comedy is harsher. Whereas Mildred Lathbury had merely to cope with new tenants in the flat below, Letty Crowe's entire building changes hands, and becomes the property of a Nigerian, Mr. Olatunde, who not only houses a large family but is "a priest of a religious sect." When Miss Crowe, disturbed by their "bursts of hymn-singing and joyful shouts," taps on their door and complains, Mr. Olatunde serenely tells her, "Christianity is disturbing."

It was difficult to know how to answer this. Indeed Letty found it impossible so Mr. Olatunde continued, smiling, "You are a Christian lady?"

Letty hesitated. Her first instinct had been to say "yes," for of course one was a Christian lady, even if one would not have put it quite like that.

In fleeing his landlordship, she becomes the tenant of the High Church, eighty-year-old Mrs. Pope, and finds herself participating in services:

On a bitter cold evening in March she joined a little group, hardly more than the two or three gathered together, shuffling round the Stations of the Cross. It was the third Wednesday in Lent and there had been snow, now hard and frozen on the ground. The church was icy. The knees of elderly women bent creakily at each Station, hands had to grasp the edge of a pew to pull the body up again. "From pain to pain, from woe to woe …" they recited, but Letty's thoughts had been on herself and how she should arrange the rest of her life.

Where Mildred Lathbury had consoled herself, and fortified her own life of unconsummated waiting, by thinking of herself and her fellow-worshippers "as being rather like the early Christians, surrounded not by lions, admittedly, but by all the traffic and bustle of a weekday lunch-hour," no such comparison lends rationale to the ascetic isolation of Miss Pym's later heroines. In place of the chaste infatuations with which the excellent women had amused themselves, Marcia Ivory has no affection but for the surgeon Dr. Strong, who has performed a mastectomy upon her and looms in her addled mind ("Marcia remembered what her mother used to say, how she would never let the surgeon's knife touch her body. How ridiculous that seemed when one considered Mr. Strong") as a masterful angel of death. When the two women simultaneously retire, the speaker at the office luncheon held in their honor does not know exactly what their jobs were, only that there is no need to replace them, and "it seemed to Letty that what cannot now be justified has perhaps never existed, and it gave her the feeling that she and Marcia had been swept away as if they had never been. With this sensation of nothingness she entered the library."

Quartet in Autumn reminds us of Muriel Spark's "Memento Mori" and of the geriatric missionaries in Rose Macaulay's "Towers of Trebizond," but the superannuated creations of these other "Christian lady" novelists have an energetic raffishness, a richness of past and a confidence of social class, denied Miss Pym's characters, who are clearly no match for their surround of anonymous office buildings and condescending young people. One of Miss Pym's enthusiastic English reviewers has been Philip Larkin, and perhaps it is to his world that the closer analogy can be drawn—the gray middle class of an empireless England, from whose halftones nevertheless the chords of a living poetry can be struck. Quartet in Autumn is a marvel of fictional harmonics, a beautifully calm and rounded passage in and out of four isolated individuals as they feebly, fitfully grope toward an ideal solidarity. Marcia, the most eccentric of the four, is the most pronouncedly private, and the most abruptly forthcoming.

"And what have you been doing with yourself?" Edwin turned to Marcia with an air of kindly enquiry which hardly deserved the fierceness of her reply.

"That's my business," she snapped.

What she has been doing, since retirement, is rearranging the junk she stores in her house, repelling a concerned social worker, letting her dyed hair grow out stark white, and sinking deeper into anorexia. Miss Pym's portrait, from within, of a "shopping-bag lady," showing the exact, plausible thought processes behind such mad actions as leaving trash in libraries and attempting to dig up a dead cat, is an achievement comparable to [Stanislaw] Lem's imagining of chemical-induced paranoia and frenzy. Both writers, in the books at hand, lead us to think about social contact, about society and sanity. Experiments in isolation rapidly induce sensations of insanity; we take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. Those victims of random chemistry in "The Chain of Chance" who survive are those who are not travelling alone, and whose behavior receives prompt social check. In the extremely meagre social fabric Miss Pym weaves for her characters, the most tenuous and trifling contacts take on the import of massive events in more thickly woven novels—those of Tolstoy, say. One wonders, indeed, if Tolstoy ever knew aloneness; even his dying was a mob scene. Most human lives have been passed in a throng of tribal and village associations. Unsought loneliness is a by-product of the modern city, and fiction by its very nature is ill equipped to treat of it. Letty Crowe, "an unashamed reader of novels," has come to realize that "the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction." In brilliantly, touchingly, frighteningly supplying that lack, and in presenting a parable of the hazards of our "atomic" condition, Barbara Pym … offer[s] us characters with strikingly modest sex drives. Whether in this they are old-fashioned or all too modern—whether under conditions of dense metropolitan crowding the primeval social glue will tactfully dry up—remains to be seen….