Barbara Pym's work is markedly different from that of other contemporary women novelists. On the surface her early novels in particular have the coziness of a Jane Austen world, and it is to Austen, whose influence Pym acknowledged, that she is most frequently compared. A. L. Rowse has called her "the Jane Austen de nos jours." Diana Benet claims that readers of Pym "are reminded of Austen because of her satiric and detailed treatment of a distinctive social group, and because of her narrative method." But, though the influence of Austen is clear, Pym is, in one way at least, the Austen of our days. She works constantly to subvert the Austen world through a systematic attack on the romantic love plot. An indication of this is obvious from an overview of the characters themselves. Although Emma in A Few Green Leaves is self-conscious about her Jane Austen namesake, the protagonists of Barbara Pym's novels usually resemble Miss Bates more than Emma. The marginal, older spinster frequently displaces the attractive young woman as protagonist in Pym's novels, and, as I shall argue, this is one aspect of Pym's revision of the romantic love plot.

It is in their settings that Pym's novels are most like Jane Austen's. Pym, like Austen, seemed to feel that "two or three families in a country village" were the very stuff of fiction. She plays on this consciously in A Few Green Leaves, where the protagonist, Emma, recalls Mr. Woodhouse's comments on soft-boiled eggs in "that novel about her namesake" and Tom Dagnall remembers Jane Fairfax and "her gift of a pianoforte." Even when the novels are set in London—Quartet in Autumn, An Unsuitable Attachment, The Sweet Dove Died, for example—London seems like a village. Characters actually inhabit a few circumscribed blocks and run into each other much as they might in a village. As Mildred Lathbury points out in Excellent Women, "so many parts of London have a peculiarly village or parochial atmosphere that perhaps it is only a question of choosing one's parish and fitting into it."

Characters are frequently compared or compare themselves or others to those in Austen's fiction, even though Ianthe in An Unsuitable Attachment claims "one did not openly identify oneself with Jane Austen's heroines." In Less Than Angels the stay-at-home daughter, Elaine, might well "have copied out Anne Elliot's words, especially as she was the same age as Miss Austen's heroine." At the end of No Fond Return of Love Aylwin Forbes justifies his own change of heart by remembering the end of Mansfield Park and "how Edmund fell out of love with Mary Crawford and came to care for Fanny."

Other literary comparisons to characters from romantic fiction, particularly to Brontë characters, are also frequent. Leonora Eyre in The Sweet Dove Died is aware of her namesake; Mildred in Excellent Women claims she is "not at all like Jane Eyre"; Beatrix in A Few Green Leaves recalls Villette; and in An Unsuitable Attachment Sophia hopes that the marriage of Ianthe to John might be interrupted like that of Mr. Rochester to Jane Eyre. In Less Than Angels Catherine thinks of herself as "looking like Jane Eyre" and Alaric Lydgate as resembling Mr. Rochester. "It isn't only we poor women who can find consolation in literature. Men can have the comfort of imagining themselves like Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester."

But the comforts and consolations of romantic fiction have their dangers for both sexes, particularly for women. Pym is not the first novelist to point out to us that novels have lied and that if we trust their portrayal of human experience we are likely to be disappointed. Jane Austen herself, after all, warned of the dangers of the gothic in Northanger Abbey. In No Fond Return of Love, Dulcie Mainwaring, admitting that her friend Viola has "turned out to be a disappointment," says she felt "as if she had created her and that she had not come up to expectations, like a character in a book who had failed to come alive, and how many people in life, if one transferred them to fiction just as they were, would fail to do that." Letty Crowe "had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realise that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction" (Quartet in Autumn). In Less Than Angels the protagonist, Catherine Oliphant, makes her living writing romantic fiction. "Did people really say things like that to each other?" wonders her friend Digby at reading the page in her typewriter.

Barbara Brothers points out that "Pym contrasts her characters and their lives with those which have been presented in literature to mock the idealised view of the romantic paradigm and to emphasise that her tales present the truth of the matter." She does not, however, examine the romantic plot conventions that Pym subverts. In the most extended and thorough treatment to date of this romantic love plot and its hold over fiction written in English, Joseph Boone examines the effects of "the fictional idealization of the married state as the individual's one true source of earthly happiness." Boone points out the marriage tradition's "manipulation of form to evoke an illusion of order and resolution [and] … the codification of its narrative plots into recognizable, repeating, and contained structures." I have discussed one of these plots, the convention of the two suitors, in Victims of Convention, where I illustrate the necessarily sexist implications of a structure in which a female protagonist learns maturity from an appropriate male suitor after rejecting the false values embodied in an unsatisfactory suitor. The readers' expectations of romantic fiction are, then, of a young, usually attractive, female protagonist who will mature as the novel progresses by learning from a superior male. The implications of the plot are of the great desirability of marriage, a life's goal for the female, sufficient to provide a sense of closure to the fiction once it has been achieved.

Boone suggests two basic ways by which the tradition of the romantic love plot has been countered by some novelists. One involves "attacking the tradition from within … by following the course of wedlock beyond its expected close and into … marital stalemate." The other is to create alternative possibilities for the single protagonist whose actions thereby create formal innovations in the conventional marriage plot. Rachel Blau DuPlessis also explores ways in which novelists have written beyond the expected ending to "express critical dissent from the dominant narrative" of the romantic love plot. "These tactics," she claims, "among them reparenting, woman-to-woman and brother-to-sister bonds, and forms of the communal protagonist, take issue with the mainstays of the social and ideological organization of gender, as these appear in fiction."

A feminist and a realist, Pym works systematically to undermine her readers' expectations of the romantic love plot and in so doing makes use of several of the methods suggested by Boone and DuPlessis. In place of the values implied by this plot, Pym offers us an ideal of community based upon what she argues is a more genuine form of love. The wrong attitude to community is exemplified in her novels by the scientific detachment of anthropologists and the right attitude by Christian commitment and caring. Although they are apparent in all her work, these values are best exemplified in what are arguably her two finest novels, Excellent Women and Quartet in Autumn.

One of Pym's most obvious methods of attacking the romantic love plot is to rebuff our expectation of a young, attractive protagonist. Her characters are marginal people, to use Jane Nardin's term, "unachieving." "Pym's characters," says Nardin, "generally tend to be older, less involved with other people, especially less involved sexually, and tend to have achieved less than the characters of many other novelists. Typically they have not married, had children, formed close emotional ties, felt great passion, or gotten anywhere in the world of work."

Her female protagonists are frequently "excellent women," older spinsters, rarely attractive, working at dead-end jobs or subsisting on small private incomes, who are often attached to a church that provides their only opportunity for good works and for a social life. We do not expect them to marry, though they are usually mildly attached to a male of their acquaintance. Jessica Morrow of Crampton Hodnet is a companion to an older woman, has a flirtation with a young curate, but is too sensible to accept his unemotional proposal of marriage. Mildred Lathbury of Excellent Women, Dulcie Mainwaring of No Fond Return of Love, Prudence Bates of Jane and Prudence, and Harriet and Belinda Bede of Some Tame Gazelle similarly occupy places in society that fiction has rarely taken seriously or considered interesting. Mary Beamish of A Glass of Blessings epitomizes the type: "she was so very much immersed in good works, so splendid, everyone said. She was about my own age, but small and rather dowdily dressed, presumably because she had neither the wish nor the ability to make the most of herself." Letty Crowe and Marcia Ivory of Quartet in Autumn have spent their lives at jobs so undistinguished that Pym never tells us what they do. When they retire they are not replaced.

It is clear that Pym has both respect and affection for her female characters, with whom she obviously identifies. She plays deliberately upon her readers' stereotypical views of them. A good illustration of this is Miss Grimes in An Unsuitable Attachment. Full of a self-righteous sense of doing good, Ianthe Broome goes to visit Miss Grimes, who has recently retired. She is at first surprised to find that Miss Grimes, "with her raffish appearance and slight Cockney accent," owns some good furniture and china. Miss Grimes offers her a glass of her regular wine, on which she spends six shillings and sixpence a week out of her old age pension. Ianthe finds this "slightly shocking … Haricot beans and lentils—or chicken breasts in aspic if they could be afforded—were really much more suitable." When Miss Grimes makes a joke about her ex-boss's sexual orientation, Ianthe begins "to feel indignant that Miss Grimes wasn't conforming more to type" and leaves realizing that she "had not really seemed as destitute and lonely as Ianthe had expected." Miss Grimes finally confounds everyone's expectations by marrying a widower she meets in a pub.

Pym's female characters are invariably stronger than their male counterparts, whom, as Jane Cleveland points out, they allow to feel superior: "Making them feel, perhaps sometimes by no more than a casual glance, that they were loved and admired and desired when they were worthy of none of these things" (Jane and Prudence). Women, Jane tells her friend Prudence, "can do nearly everything that men can now. And they are getting so much bigger and taller and men are getting smaller, haven't you noticed?" John Halperin quotes the comment made to him by Pym's editor and friend, Hazel Holt: "'There is no doubt that she thought women the stronger sex.'" There is no question in a Pym novel of women maturing under the guidance of a male suitor. They are fully aware of their own superiority, tending, like Catherine Oliphant in Less Than Angels, "to regard most men … as children." Men, she feels, "appeared to be so unsubtle."

Pym's male characters do little to counteract this view. They are usually weak figures. Self-centered, ineffectual clergymen, like Archdeacon Hoccleve in Some Tame Gazelle or Nicholas Cleveland in Jane and Prudence, are common. They are also given to stereotypical views of women. Women smoke more than men at conferences, according to Aylwin Forbes, "Because of the emptiness of their lives, no doubt, most of them being unmarried" (No Fond Return). Mark Penfold defines a reciprocal relationship as "the woman giving the food and shelter and doing some typing for him and the man giving the priceless gift of himself" (Less Than Angels). The fussy old maids of Pym's novels are invariably men, William Caldicote of Excellent Women; for example, who is upset when his office is changed because different pigeons come to the window, or Mervyn Cantrell of An Unsuitable Attachment, living with his old mother, unable to eat restaurant food, coveting other people's furniture.

Marriage is not presented as a goal to be sought in Pym's novels, and she demonstrates this by the method Boone discusses of pursuing wedlock into "marital stalemate." Marriage is frequently a question of "dullness rather than cosiness" and without "much rapture" (Less Than Angels). Those long-term relationships that do occur in Pym's fiction tend to have gone stale, like Jane and Nicholas Cleveland's in Jane and Prudence, called by Halperin "the most sustained attack on men among Pym's novels." It is not surprising that Mrs. Williton "began to wonder why Marjorie had married Aylwin, and when no answer suggested itself she went on to wonder why anybody married anybody. It only brought trouble to themselves and their relations" (No Fond Return). In Quartet in Autumn Edwin celebrates the freedom his widowhood brings: "He could go to church as often as he liked, attend meetings that went on all evening, store stuff for jumble sales in the back room and leave it there for months. He could go to the pub or the vicarage and stay there till all hours." Mary Strauss-Noll points out that "the ideal state in Pym's fiction appears to be widowhood."

Nevertheless, in contrast to the problems and illusions of romantic passion, the ordinary comforts of marriage sometimes hold up quite well. Pym deliberately undercuts the romantic daydreams of her characters with the mundane realities of everyday life. Her characters like the fantasy of romantic love but not the discomforts of an erotic relationship. The pattern of Crampton Hodnet is typical of Pym's method. Three relationships begin in the early chapters of the novel. Anthea Cleveland has a new boyfriend, Simon; her father is infatuated with one of his students, Barbara Bird, who has a crush on him but knows that "although it was a love stronger than death, it wasn't a love one did anything about"; and the curate, Mr. Latimer, takes a room in the house of Miss Doggett where, out of boredom, he becomes involved with her companion, Jessica Morrow. All three relationships become complicated: Simon goes on vacation; Francis and Barbara are observed together by several of their acquaintances; and Miss Morrow and Mr. Latimer become involved in a series of lies in an attempt to explain an innocent afternoon in the country. But instead of rescuing her lovers from their dilemmas Pym merely exposes the shallowness of their feelings. Simon finds a new girlfriend and Anthea is not long in finding new interests herself; rejected by Miss Morrow, Mr. Latimer similarly finds himself a new relationship while on vacation in Paris; and Francis Cleveland is relieved and quite content to return to his mundane marriage when Barbara abandons him on the first night of their trip to Paris.

Pym also challenges the conventions of the romantic love plot with the reappearance, usually in cameo roles, of characters from her earlier novels. In Excellent Women, Archdeacon Hoccleve from Some Tame Gazelle is a guest preacher. In Jane and Prudence both Mildred Lathbury and William Caldicote are briefly mentioned, and we learn of Mildred's marriage to Everard Bone. In the same novel Miss Doggett, Miss Morrow, and a very changed Barbara Bird from Crampton Hodnet reappear. Less Than Angels, like Excellent Women about anthropologists, recycles Professor Mainwaring, Esther Clovis, Helena Napier, and Everard Bone from the earlier novel. A Glass of Blessings gathers together characters from several other novels: Archdeacon Hoccleve from Some Tame Gazelle, Julian and Winifred Malory and Rocky Napier from Excellent Women, Prudence Bates from Jane and Prudence and Catherine Oliphant from Less Than Angels.

Sometimes the effect of the reappearance is ironic. In A Glass of Blessings Rowena comments on a story by Catherine Oliphant in a magazine she is reading in which a young man and a girl hold hands in a restaurant watched by the man's former mistress. "What a farfetched situation," Wilmet protests. "As if it would happen like that!" A reader who is familiar with Less than Angels knows, of course, that the incident did in fact happen to Catherine Oliphant herself. As Diana Benet says, "these cameo appearances satisfy our curiosity about the fate of certain characters." Mildred Lathbury and Jessica Morrow, for example, do not marry in the novels in which they first appear; Esther Clovis and Fabian Driver die in later novels, Esther after several reappearances. The main purpose of the recurring characters is surely, though, to resist the sense of closure provided by the romantic love plot. Pym suggests a world of ever-widening circles. As in Margaret Drabble's novels, each story is broadened by our knowledge of the others. Her universe is potentially unlimited, her novels without boundaries.

In a variety of ways, then, Pym works to subvert the romantic love plot, but this is not the whole of Pym. There is affirmation in her novels as well as a good deal of clear-eyed cynicism. As I suggested earlier, Pym appears to affirm the ordinariness of daily life as opposed to the intensities of romantic passion. Dulcie Mainwaring's comments in No Fond Return of Love could have occurred in a Drabble novel: "But there is more satisfaction in scrubbing a floor or digging a garden, Dulcie thought. One seems nearer to the heart of things doing menial tasks." Her novels often tend, through circular plots, to return characters, perhaps a little more content, to where they were when the novel opened. Both Some Tame Gazelle and A Glass of Blessings are examples of this. Marriages continue; extramarital relationships, which threatened change, are discontinued. The solace of a cup of tea or some Ovaltine is frequent in Pym: "What a pity we can't make a cup of Ovaltine," thinks Dulcie. "Life's problems are often eased by hot milky drinks." Pym said of herself that "I've always liked details" (Civil to Strangers), and she does indeed give us a wonderfully perceptive realism dense with affectionately observed details of ordinary life.

But Pym also sees obsession with detail as neurotic ritualization, often a source for comedy in the novels. Less Than Angels shows us a range of characters all concerned with their own or others' rituals. Mark and Digby are surprised that Catherine does housework in the evenings: "'People usually do that kind of thing in the mornings,' said Digby almost disapprovingly. 'I don't know what my mother would say.'" Similarly Rhoda objects that Mrs. Skinner beats her rugs in the evening rather than the morning: "if everybody were to beat their rugs in the evening, just think of the noise!" Deidre thinks that at home "her mother would be laying the breakfast and later her aunt would creep down to see if she had done it correctly. And they would probably go on doing this all their lives." In Quartet in Autumn Marcia Ivory crosses the line between common neurosis and debilitating compulsion. She collects tins of food but rarely eats, sorts plastic bags into various sizes and keeps them in drawers but never uses them, and collects milk bottles, though only of one kind, in her shed in the garden. Pym's superb description of her decline from eccentricity into insanity makes it clear that Marcia is only an extension of any of us.

Obsessive ritualization is, as Pym realizes, often a substitute for feeling, and it is genuine feeling, including romantic love, that Pym affirms. Real emotion, of course, does not always occur between heterosexual couples with a potential for marriage, as the romantic love plot suggests. In Pym's novels it frequently springs up between unlikely people. Her attachments are often "unsuitable": older women and homosexual men like Leonora and James or Meg and Colin in The Sweet Dove Died or Wilmet and Piers in A Glass of Blessings; homosexual couples such as James and Ned in The Sweet Dove Died; homosexual couples of different social classes such as Harold and Colin in The Sweet Dove Died or Piers and Keith in A Glass of Blessings. Highlighting the positive values of alternative relationships, as DuPlessis argues, in itself counters the ideal of heterosexual marriage.

Pym's excellent women do not marry for the sake of being married, but they do seek love. Belinda Bede rejects the marriage proposal of Bishop Grote because she does not love him, and even in old age she is not prepared to settle for anything less: "'I'm afraid I can't marry you,' she said, looking down at her floury hands. 'I don't love you.' 'But you respect and like me,' said the Bishop, as if that went without saying. 'We need not speak of love—one would hardly expect that now.' 'No,' said Belinda miserably, 'I suppose one would not expect it. But you see,' she went on, 'I did love somebody once'" (Some Tame Gazelle). Jessica Morrow's thoughts after she rejects Mr. Latimer probably represent Pym's views best: "For she wanted love, or whatever it was that made Simon and Anthea walk along the street not noticing other people simply because they had each other's eyes to look into…. And then, how much more sensible it was to satisfy one's springlike impulses by buying a new dress in an unaccustomed and thoroughly unsuitable colour than by embarking on a marriage without love" (Crampton Hodnet). Pym does not suggest that Jessica Morrow is foolish for feeling this way. Spring impulses toward erotic love move many of her characters; even Norman takes an unaccustomed evening bus ride in Quartet in Autumn and finds himself standing outside Marcia's house. And Pym finally allows Jessica the marriage she wants, to Fabian Driver, but not until a later novel, Jane and Prudence.

Pym effectively convinces her reader that the romantic love plot does not apply in her novels, that she is describing life more realistically. She appears to assure us that her women are not the kind that receive a fond return of love and marry, only, on occasion, to marry them after all. So in An Unsuitable Attachment Penny does get Rupert and Ianthe marries John against the expectations both of her friends and the reader: "'I never thought of her as getting married—it seems all wrong,' Sophia burst out." Similarly in No Fond Return of Love Dulcie Mainwaring gets Aylwin Forbes and in Excellent Women Mildred Lathbury ends up with Everard Bone. Pym, then, does not reject romantic love, only the limitations of the plot in which novelists have usually presented it. Marriage is not the aim of life, but it is possible even for "unlikely" people.

The pattern I have described above is perhaps best illustrated by Excellent Women, one of Pym's finest novels. Excellent Women is the story of Mildred Lathbury; at least it becomes the story of Mildred Lathbury, because initially, as Benet says, "Mildred denies possession of the heroine's sine qua non: she has, she implies, no story of her own." Mildred is "an unmarried woman just over thirty who lives alone and has no apparent ties." Not very attractive, she refuses to identify with even a plain heroine: "Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person, nor have I ever thought of myself as being like her." So Pym warns us against the expectations of the romantic love plot.

Mildred lives in London, but in a part of London that has become no larger than a village to her, on a small private income, helping, on a volunteer basis, distressed gentle-women, "a cause very near to my own heart, as I felt that I was just the kind of person who might one day become one." Small details absorb her. She worries about who should buy the toilet paper when she has to share a bathroom: "The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one." She is fully self-aware, even ironic, about her own situation, one of the qualities that makes her sympathetic to the reader. She expects "to find herself involved or interested in other people's business" and knows that since "she is a clergyman's daughter then one might really say that there is no hope for her." She is prepared to find it right that she should spend Saturday night "sitting alone eating a very small chop."

She sees herself as a different species of woman from those who marry. Her memories are all of rejection. "I remembered girlhood dances, where one had stayed there too long, though never long enough to last out the dance for which one hadn't a partner. I didn't suppose Helena had ever known that." "I have never been very good at games; people never chose me at school when it came to picking sides." She often feels like "a dog or some inferior class of person." Mildred's only romantic interest has been a tepid relationship with a bank clerk called Bernard Hatherley whom she met at church. He had given her less expensive presents than she had given him; they had gone for country walks and had "talks about life and about himself. I did not remember that we had ever talked about me." Eventually he had rejected her for a girl he met on vacation and "had not broken the news of another attachment very gracefully."

Mildred is remarkably positive about her life, despite regretting that she "was not really first in anybody's life." She finds it "pleasant … to be living alone," feels that "I was now old enough to become fussy and spinsterish if I wanted to," and tells Everard Bone that "excellent women" "are for being unmarried … and by that I mean a positive rather than a negative state." She has romantic moods: a fine spring day with a "blue sky full of billowing white clouds … thrilling little breezes … mimosa on the barrows" makes her long for "a splendid romantic person" to be having lunch with, rather than William Caldicote with "his preoccupation with his health and his food and his spiteful old-maidish delight in gossip." But she finds it safer to avoid feeling: "Mimosa did lose its first freshness too quickly to be worth buying and I must not allow myself to have feelings, but must only observe the effects of other people's."

We are not led to expect more for Mildred than she expects for herself. Her closest friends are Julian Malory, her clergyman, and his sister Winifred. Although they both, together with most of her other acquaintances, believe that Mildred must be in love with Julian, she is not. Nor, of course, is she in love with William Caldicote, with whom she has an annual lunch. He works with other "grey men" at an undefined clerical job and encourages Mildred to believe that they are "the observers of life." Mildred is cynical about men, observing that "men did not usually do things unless they liked doing them," and that "men sometimes leave difficulties to be solved by other people." She laughs with her cleaning woman, "a couple of women against the whole race of men." Attending an Old Girls' Reunion with her friend Dora, Mildred realizes that it is "the ring on the left hand" that people looked for but adds "somehow I do not think we ever imagined the husbands to be quite so uninteresting as they probably were."

Into Mildred's life come the Napiers—Rocky, a naval officer with a reputation as a ladies' man, and his anthropologist wife Helena. They move into the flat below Mildred, and their proximity makes frequent contact inevitable. Three "unsuitable" attachments develop: Helena is romantically inclined toward Everard Bone, an anthropologist colleague who has no interest in her; Julian Malory becomes engaged to Allegra Gray, a selfish clergyman's widow, who has no concern for the future of Julian's sister, Winifred; and Mildred is attracted to Rocky, whose charm and kindness make it easy for her to forget his shallowness.

The pattern of Excellent Women is a series of flows and ebbs in Mildred's emotional state. Whenever Mildred is tempted into romantic ideas, the chapter ends by bringing her—and the reader—firmly back to what we take to be reality. Thinking of Rocky, Mildred forgets her prayers, and chapter 4 ends with: "There came into my mind a picture of Mr. Mallett, with raised finger and roguish voice, saying, 'Tut, tut, Miss Lathbury….'" After Mildred spends an afternoon with Rocky, he forgets to give her back her mimosa; Mildred observes at the end of chapter 8, "There was a vase of catkins and twigs on the table in my sitting-room. 'Oh, the kind of women who bring dry twigs into the house and expect leaves to come on them!' Hadn't Rocky said something like that at tea?" After talking with a stranger about Rocky, she looks at her face in the mirror and finds it "enough to discourage anybody's romantic thoughts." In a moment of excitement Mildred buys herself a lipstick called Hawaiian Fire but on the way home stops for tea and sees women "braced up, their faces newly done…. I had only my Hawaiian Fire and something not very interesting for supper." Rocky returns to his wife, who has given up all hope of Everard; Julian breaks off his engagement to Allegra when she tries to drive Winifred out of the house; and Mildred loses interest in Rocky after he moves away and fails to follow up on an invitation to visit him. The romantic love plot appears to be thoroughly undermined.

But Mildred's life changes after all. At first too self-deprecating to believe that Everard can have any feeling for her, she finally allows a relationship to develop between them. Nardin claims that "Mildred's marriage to Everard will be based upon an excellent woman's habit of putting herself second…. The ending of Excellent Women is as sly an attack on the conventional conclusion of comedy with its celebratory marriages as is the ending of Some Tame Gazelle." Surely this is not the case. We learn little of Mildred and Everard's marriage in later novels, but it is probably safe to assume that it has its disappointments, like all the other marriages in Pym's work. Nevertheless, if we agree with Benet that the novel is concerned with whether the protagonist will continue to be an observer of "the lives of others, or a woman engaged in a full life of her own," then the ending is not ironic. Mildred herself certainly believes her situation has changed, and she has not been given to self-deception. Julian Malory, she thinks at the end of the novel, "might need to be protected from the women who were going to live in his house. So, what with my duty there and the work I was going to do for Everard, it seemed as if I might be going to have what Helena called 'a full life' after all." "A full life," to Pym, is involvement in a community, albeit through small, ordinary deeds. It is significant that though readers of Pym's later novels know that Mildred and Everard do marry, she ends Excellent Women with that marriage only a possibility, not a solution. It is not marriage that matters, Pym is saying, but living one's own story.

Pym's ideal of community is defined through a contrast between anthropology and Christianity that begins in Excellent Women, occurs throughout Pym's work, and comes to signify the opposition of detached observation to involvement and genuine emotion. In An Unsuitable Attachment, Rupert Stonebird, anthropologist, knows "that men and women may observe each other as warily as wild animals hidden in long grass." He "changed into a dark suit as a kind of protective colouring, so that he could sit quietly observing rather than being observed." Rupert has "an anthropologist's detachment," Pym tells us. When anthropologist Gervase Fairfax makes a sarcastic remark, Ianthe "did not know what answer to make. People at church garden parties did not make such remarks" (An Unsuitable Attachment).

Pym makes frequent comparisons between anthropologists and novelists. Everard Bone points out that "both study life in communities, though the novelist need not be so accurate or bother with statistics and kinship tables" (An Unsuitable Attachment). This comparison suggests that Pym was perhaps ambivalent about her profession despite her claim that she "learned how it was possible and even essential to cultivate an attitude of detachment towards life and people, and how the novelist could even do 'field-work' as the anthropologist did" (Civil to Strangers). It seems probable that Pym saw the novelist's job as isolating and novelists as potentially lacking in compassion as social scientists.

The alternative to anthropology is Christianity. Emma, the anthropologist in A Few Green Leaves, remembers "her role as an anthropologist and observer—the necessity of being on the outside looking in." However, she abandons anthropology and moves from detachment to emotional involvement, with the local clergyman, Tom Dagnall. Pym gives us to understand that this is a good thing. Pym does not idealize the church or clergymen or Christians—she is all too well aware of human limitations to do that—but she does respect the spirit of Christianity even if she sometimes mocks its practitioners. The church in Pym's novels does serve to bring people together, often providing them with a caring community. In An Unsuitable Attachment clergyman Mark Ainger and his wife Sophia renew their marriage on a trip to Rome, a trip that Mark has organized as a vacation for an odd assortment of his parishioners. "Underlying the concept of community," says Benet, "is an essential form of love, an attitude composed of goodwill and compassion for others simply because they are fellow human beings; it is the responsible benevolence toward others enjoined by the commandment to 'Love thy neighbor as thyself.'"

It is essentially a Christian concept of community that Pym makes the subject of Quartet in Autumn, although of the four main characters only Edwin is a churchgoer. Interestingly, he seems the most contented of the four and the most connected to other people. Pym's concern here is "the ordinary responsibility of one human being towards another." The four protagonists, Norman, Edwin, Marcia, and Letty, colleagues working in the same office at undefined tasks, are all single and living alone. They do not see each other outside the office and yet are really more comfortable with each other than with other people. After his Christmas break, Norman "quite looked forward to getting back to the office and hearing how the others had got on." The pattern of the novel follows their occasional moves toward contact, moves that are almost never completed. The most successful at human contact is Edwin, the only one who has been married. He finds Letty a new place to live when she feels she must leave her apartment, goes with Father Gellibrand to see if he can help Marcia, and organizes the lunch for Letty and Marcia after their retirement.

The least connected is Marcia. She dreads being forced to offer Letty a home: "For of course it would be impossible—she couldn't have anybody else living in her house…. The difficulties were insuperable." Marcia becomes increasingly isolated as the novel progresses, resenting and resisting all efforts to help her. Marcia once had some feeling for Norman but has transferred all feeling now to her surgeon, Mr. Strong, who performed her mastectomy. The only way in which Marcia expresses her feelings, though, is spying. She once followed Norman to the British Museum and makes a treat for herself of standing outside Mr. Strong's house. The detachment involved in spying and observation is, of course, linked to the negative aspects of anthropology. And Marcia is by no means alone among Pym's characters in doing it. In A Few Green Leaves, Miss Lee and Miss Grundy conceal themselves in a thicket to catch a glimpse of Sir Miles and his guests at the manor, and Adam Prince watches "Graham and Emma 'canoodling,' as he put it, on the grass."

Ironically it is Marcia's death that improves their situations for the other three. They meet in Edwin's house for the first time after the funeral for which he has made all the arrangements. "Marcia's death had of course brought them closer together…. The most important thing was that they were seeing Edwin's house for the first time, never having been invited into it before." Norman inherits Marcia's house, which gives him "a good feeling, like a dog with two tails, as people sometimes put it." The book ends with a sense of increased community as Letty invites the other two to a day in the country with her friend Marjorie and realizes "that life still held infinite possibilities for change."

In place of the values of the romantic love plot, Pym affirms the interdependence of community, the pleasures of ordinary life, and the importance of genuine emotion—even of romantic love—in human relationships. Small communities exist in most of Pym's novels, often centered around a church as in Some Tame Gazelle and Excellent Women. Sometimes, as in A Few Green Leaves, the setting actually is a country village, but more often Pym simply creates the sense of limited space by frequent interaction among a small number of characters. She heightens this sense of community by her habit of reintroducing characters from earlier novels. This is her way, perhaps, of redeeming novelists after all, for, in addition to preventing closure, this device also serves as a way of providing her readers with their own sense of community, a sense of belonging to the world of Pym's novels.