At age fifty, Barbara (Mary Crampton) Pym, having published six novels appreciated by a small but faithful audience, suddenly found her seventh work refused by her publisher. She wrote nothing else for some sixteen years until she was "discovered" in a March 11, 1977, Times Literary Supplement feature on underrated and overrated writers of the past seventy-five years as evaluated by a symposium of literary critics. Lauded by Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, she was the only writer to be twice praised. Subsequently, she re-emerged with Quartet in Autumn (1977), saw all of her books reissued, enjoyed success in America—including the admiration of Newsweek (October 23, 1978), a short story in The New Yorker (July 16, 1979), and publication by Vanguard, Dutton, Harper and Row, and Macmillan, and became "the in-thing to read" in Britain. Miss Pym died on January 11, 1980, and her final two novels, The Sweet Dove Died (1978) and A Few Green Leaves (1980), were published posthumously. Recently (1982), the rejected book, An Unsuitable Attachment, discovered among her papers, has been published to bring her canon to ten novels.

The predominant critical assessment finds Pym a "domesticated" Jane Austen, and reviewers make much of her diminished scale and wry sense of humor in novels of manners. They also promote her as the depictor of English spinsterhood and as something of a man-hater. In the latter regard, for example, Karl Miller suggests that her work is "grist to the feminist mill." However, her attitudes toward spinsters and men, as well as toward non-spinsters, need reassessment. She is keenly aware, in each of her novels, of the drab, pathetic-seeming lives of her contemporary middle-class Englishmen, men and women. The same nonjudging, reporting eye lays all of them before us in detailed portraiture. The ironic comment falls where it may, and the most telling evidence of her own spinsterhood resides in a general tendency to avoid depicting motherhood in her novels. Even so, she can be mildly censorious of the childless; in An Unsuitable Attachment, Sophia Ainger, who is married but has no offspring, is fixated, humorously, on her cat, Faustina. If Pym's fictional world teems with spinsters, she makes us believe, without suspicion of her miscalculation, that the reason is simple: here is England as it really is.

There are spinsters in Pym's world—and then there are spinsters. Her heroines are seldom old maids because they have no other choice. In her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, Harriet Bede receives constant proposals from Count Bianco and is wooed by the librarian, Mr. Mold. The elder and more spinsterish Belinda Bede is proposed to by Bishop Grote. Both women, who are in their sixties, decline. By An Unsuitable Attachment, they have fulfilled their richest dream and have removed to a villa in Italy with a sickly clergyman under their protection. In Excellent Women, whose title refers to the church-fixated "elderly ladies and dim spinsters" throughout England, Mildred Lathbury, just over thirty, is attracted to the already married Rockingham Napier, might "after a decent interval" finally marry Father Julian Malory, and at the end seems sure to get anthropologist Everard Bone. In Jane and Prudence, the first title character is already married to a clergyman; and the second, who is twenty-nine, has had a constant march of admirers. Although she loses Fabian Driver to the much older spinster, Jessie Morrow, she is at the last "overwhelmed by the richness of her life"—Manifold, Dr. Grampian, and even Edward Lyall, "M.P." In Less Than Angels, Catherine Oliphant, who is thirty-one, loses Tom Mallow to Deirdre Swan as perhaps Elaine, the first love, who raises golden retrievers, has lost him to her. In turn, Catherine enlivens the dull life of another would-be anthropologist, Alaric Lydgate, whom she will most likely marry. Deirdre gets Digby Fox, and Elaine gets to keep her memories intact and to know that Tom was writing her just before he died. In A Glass of Blessings, Wilmet, who is already married, is forced to reappraise her seemingly routine life and dull husband after her abortive flings with the spouse of her best friend and with Rowena's homosexual brother, Piers Longridge, after her husband Rodney admits his own misconduct, and after dowdy spinster Mary Beamish manages to pull off the feat of marrying handsome Father Ransome. In No Fond Return of Love, Dulcie Mainwaring, in her early thirties, is rejected by her fiancé because of her "simple goodness," which is too hard to live with, but, at the end, it is obvious that she will get the much more desirable Aylwin Forbes. In An Unsuitable Attachment, one of the liaisons referred to by the title is the eventual marriage of spinster Ianthe Broome and the younger John Challow; and the satire is directed toward those who find the attachment unsuitable. The same novel leaves us anticipating a wedding between Rupert Stonebird and Penelope Grandison. In A Few Green Leaves, career woman Emma Howick never gets Graham Pettifer, though they have some kind of a relationship, but she is on her way to getting Tom Dagnall, the rector of the Oxfordshire village where she goes to write.

The two women in Quartet in Autumn are the only true spinsters among the main characters in the entire Pym canon, and Letty is one of her most delightful creations. Even Marcia might have had a relationship with Norman. As it is, her senility and eccentricity show the dangers of walling oneself off from other humans rather than spinsterism per se. The two men in the book, Edwin and Norman, suffer nearly as much from their willful isolationism. Always, life in the Pym world, whether she is depicting male or female, is largely what one makes it. Its "greyness," the predominant color reference in the novels, particularly Quartet in Autumn, can be interpreted and lived out either positively or negatively. For example, in A Few Green Leaves, Emma, pondering the meaning of a letter from Graham and life's "few twists to the man-woman story," is drawn to consider the telephone as a means of clarifying their relationship: "Its fashionable shade of grey suggested peace and repose, (unless one thought of grey as the colour of desolation, which it might also be)."

Perhaps Pym's least sympathetic character is Leonora Eyre of The Sweet Dove Died. Now approaching fifty, she could have made "brilliant marriages" but has chosen instead a life of culture aloof from common people, and she tends to recreate those around her in her own image. James, over twenty years her junior, is the "sweet dove" of the title. He escapes her briefly in a liaison with Ned, an American his own age, but is finally recaptured "like an animal being enticed back into its cage." Clearly, some of Pym's spinsters not only willfully choose their spinsterhood but use it deliberately to set their lives and the lives of others as they wish them to be.

Prior to their emergence from the role of spinster, Pym's heroines are as closely involved as are their sisters, the countless number of British women who do not marry in the novels, in the world of the clergy. This association may well be one cause for the criticism that Pym is unsympathetic to men, for her clergymen are, by and large, rather despicable. What is overlooked, however, is the fact that the relationship is symbiotic. The men of the cloth are perceived as being comfortable with spinsters and widows, feel that gifts of knitted socks and various delicacies are their just due, and, like Archbishop Hoccleve in Some Tame Gazelle, are hurt when they are not forthcoming. Even a man, Aylwin Forbes in No Fond Return of Love, recognizes that "all men connected with the Church … would be at ease with ladies." On the other hand, as Viola Dace points out, they are rather at the mercy of the female sex. For their part, the women, with some exceptions, find fulfillment in doing church work and catering to the needs of the clergy, whom they prefer to be unmarried. It is in fact a woman, Jane of Jane and Prudence, who wonders that the village women did not tear the assistant vicar to pieces when they discovered that he came to them already engaged. Harriet Bede's life in Some Tame Gazelle is measured out in terms of the arrival of the next young clergyman, and her whole sense of the fitness of things has been predetermined by a girlish vision of the tall, pale man who would be her husband and who is best exemplified by clergymen.

Middle-aged spinsters are the backbone of the English parish. They do get used, but most of them believe that women need to feel needed, a theme that is as true of Pym's last books as it is of the early ones (e.g., No Fond Return of Love and A Glass of Blessings). Moreover, Pym's men need to feel needed, too. If Tom Dagnall, the rector in A Few Green Leaves, appropriates all of the women at his disposal, including his sister, Daphne, his selfishness is unpremeditated. They are simply there to be used, not only to decorate for the various church festivals and polish the brass to a high luster but to further his true passion, local history. In truth, Tom is no more selfish in sending Magdalen Raven among the gravestones and through the church register to check dates for the custom of burying in wool than is her son-in-law, Martin Shrubsole, who finds her an interesting case study for his specialty of geriatrics, as well as a live-in baby-sitter. Tom automatically adds the new arrival, Emma Howick, to his group of workers—doubtless she can type and perhaps even decipher Elizabethan handwriting—just as he hopes to pick the brains of Miss Vereker about life at the manor house and of Miss Lickerish about the ancient customs of the village. What is often overlooked is the fact that Emma uses in her turn. Having come here to write up her research on one of the new English towns, she finds herself taking notes on the villagers with an eye toward a publication about them; in this respect, she is much akin to Jean-Pierre le Rossignol of Less Than Angels, who goes about minutely observing the habits of the English. Clearly, in Pym's novels, using and being used are not confined to a particular sex.

Barbara Pym is atypical in her treatment of spinsters and of women in general. Most of her major female characters are employed: Emma Howick (A Few Green Leaves) and Helena Napier (Excellent Women) are anthropologists; Prudence Bates (Jane and Prudence) works for some kind of cultural organization; Catherine Oliphant (Less Than Angels) is a writer; Marcia and Letty (Quartet in Autumn) work in an office; Dulcie Mainwaring and Viola Dace (No Fond Return of Love) and Penelope Grandison (An Unsuitable Attachment) have vague connections with the publishing world; Mildred Lathbury (Excellent Women) works part-time to help impoverished gentlewomen; Leonora Eyre (The Sweet Dove Died) has done "secret work" in the south of England prior to the invasion of Normandy; and Ianthe Broome (An Unsuitable Attachment) is a librarian. Only Jane (Jane and Prudence), Sophia (An Unsuitable Attachment), and Wilmet (A Glass of Blessings) are married and do not work, although Jane's and Sophia's roles as clergymen's wives, properly executed, would constitute careers. The fact that they do not successfully carry out their duties is evidence of Pym's objectivity. Their husbands are equally limited. Similarly, Wilmet's idleness produces feelings of guilt and uselessness and leads her to largely imagined betrayals of her husband, who is also flawed. Ultimately, we begin to suspect that Pym's assessments of her characters are most influenced by the work ethic of England under attack and by her own intense involvement with the Women's Royal Naval Service (1943–46) and sense of vocation as Assistant Editor of Africa, the journal of the International African Institute, also a probable source for her novels' interest in anthropology. Hers is a general human as opposed to a chauvinistic stance for male or female.

Though she is largely a pre-Feminist Movement author who finds fault on both sides of the battle between the sexes, Pym is aware of the traditional limitations society imposes on women. Thus Mildred Lathbury is delighted at the success of Ethel Victoria Thorneycroft Nollard in 1907—"a woman then!" Prudence wonders if Miss Birkinshaw has had a splendid tragic romance in the past or is a "new woman" rejecting marriage for Donne, Marvell, and Carew. At any rate, her "great work" on the Metaphysicals remains unfinished, and Pym suggests that the fault is his own. Women's careers, nonetheless, do seem to get in the way of relationships as Tom, of Less Than Angels, seeks solace with Deirdre (a budding anthropologist—a "new" profession) because Catherine is writing a story and has no time for him. At Graham's for a drink, Emma, who thinks up "The Role of Women in a West Oxfordshire Community" as a book title, becomes bored and wishes she were alone doing her own work. When she decides to go and do just that, Graham feels that she must be accompanied home, for women are "not yet as equal as all that." In Less Than Angels, contrastingly, when Digby worries that he and Mark should have seen Deirdre home, the latter tells him that "women consider themselves our equals now"; in No Fond Return of Love, Sedge makes Viola feel like a woman even in the days of so-called equality. Pym's books present a time when "women were more likely to go off to Africa to shoot lions as a cure for unrequited love …[,] in the old days … a man's privilege." Still, according to Jane and Prudence, the only place where women take full precedence is in the announcement of their marriages in their school chronicles, and Mary Beamish, of A Glass of Blessings, is strongly opposed to the notion that women might sometime be admitted to Holy Orders. On the other hand, shy and quiet Belinda, of Pym's first novel, Some Tame Gazelle (1950), wishes that she could be "Deaconess Bede" and straighten out the church life of the village. Similarly, in The Sweet Dove Died, Leonora Eyre's entire character is set forth when she becomes piqued that events are taken out of her hands by having Humphrey invite her to lunch before she can "drop in" on his shop. The very feminine Dulcie Mainwaring is wise enough to want her niece to become interested in a subject like computer science rather than English or history or at the least not to become a secretary to a publisher (No Fond Return of Love, published in 1961).

Pym liked to upend sexual stereotypes before such a method was fashionable. Her women, accordingly, are likely to be complete domestic failures as are Jane (Jane and Prudence) and Winifred and Helena (Excellent Women). Jane and Daphne (A Few Green Leaves) also hate flower-arranging. Adam Prince would be horrified, for he is sure that all ladies can arrange flowers. When he was a priest, watching them do so was one of the activities he enjoyed most. Catherine Oliphant, of Less Than Angels, is an excellent cook and loves doing housework but primarily because she often gets her ideas for her writing while doing it. Dulcie feels that people are "nearer to the heart of things doing menial tasks" (No Fond Return of Love). Rocky Napier is the cook in his family, as well as the one who is fixated on collecting Victorian (Excellent Women); Wilf Bason discourses on the achievements of men as cooks (A Glass of Blessings); and Adam Prince is an inspector for a gourmet food magazine and frequently invades the woman's world of jumble sales (A Few Green Leaves). Yet in The Sweet Dove Died, Humphrey admonishes Leonora that book auctions are no place for a woman. Later, she slips away to sales without letting him know. When Mildred is with William Caldicote, who takes a "spiteful old-maidish delight in gossip" (Excellent Women), she has to buy her own mimosa and then share it with Rocky.

While there is much talk of the meticulosity of women's memories, it is they who sometimes forget important details of former love affairs in Pym's works. In A Few Green Leaves, Graham Pettifer sends Emma a postcard with a Corot painting that she used to like; she does not remember it at all. Pym's short story, "Across a Crowded Room," itself a reversal of the song from which it takes its title, turns upon the revelation that the college mate whom the protagonist sees at Oxford for the first time in forty years has never been married, contrary to her memory of him. Further, as Aylwin Forbes tries to avoid Viola Dace in No Fond Return of Love, Miss Randall avoids him, stating that men do not realize "that they are not the only ones to be practising the avoidance." Dulcie herself believes that even if she were married, her character probably would not change very much, a view shared by Jessica Foy, who knows perfectly well that she and Dulcie would not allow a man to "mold" them. In some cases, quite the reverse is true, for Jessie Morrow in Jane and Prudence literally scares the very experienced Fabian Driver into marriage with such pronouncements as that women are very powerful and perhaps always triumph in the end. So persuasive is she that, though he feels the net closing around him, he is unable to escape it. Some men may be afflicted by female "maladies" as Driver and Lyall try to outdo each other in their verbalizations of their weariness. It is also the men who are most routine-driven; for example, William in Excellent Women can not survive a day without feeding the pigeons from his office window at precisely the same time.

The men in Pym's novels do tend to operate from a set of stereotypes about women. They plead that they can not understand females (e.g., Dr. Parnell in Some Tame Gazelle; Mary's brother in A Glass of Blessings; and Bone in Excellent Women). At the same time, they know that all women enjoy missing meals and becoming martyrs, as Archbishop Hoccleve says in Some Tame Gazelle. They believe that their "good ladies" should leave the talking to them and vote their way (Harry in A Glass of Blessings). They do not want their wives to work except for financial exigency lest they become the kind of women who step from trains carrying initialed briefcases and who prepare their brussel sprouts behind the filing cabinet. Nevertheless, they rely on the comfortable assumption that so much can be left to women, despite how ineffectual they are when a "simple tin" must be opened. Many men feel that women should not drink before a meal (e.g., Cash in A Glass of Blessings), and practically all of them are convinced that women cannot appreciate wine. Pym's exception is Catherine Oliphant, of Less Than Angels, who is a veritable oenologist and is always going into wine shops for the new lists, an activity that she shares with Alaric, who is her new interest. The other women do appear ignorant of the subject, to the extent that Adams advises Tom to slip in better wine for the church—the female treasurer would not know the difference.

According to Pym's men, women do not make as much of living and take their pleasures "very, very sadly." They get "sudden irrational passions," such as Helena's for Bone in Excellent Women and "women's disorders" that not even a brother dare ask about (Tom on Daphne in A Few Green Leaves). Keeping busy is the panacea for their problems, and Nicholas, the curate—the reader is ever mindful that the clergy know all there is to know about women—thinks that Prudence, in addition to her job, should take up social work (Jane and Prudence). According to Neville, another clergyman, and Aylwin Forbes, women should not allow themselves to be seen very much (No Fond Return of Love), and the latter believes that they smoke more than men because of the emptiness of their lives. Men are, at the same time, disappointed if they do not have a profound effect on women; in Less Than Angels, not knowing how Elaine has labored to train herself to be restrained, Tom is hurt by her calmness at his kiss, and when he sees Prudence's tears, Arthur Grampian of Jane and Prudence is pleased that he still has his power over women. Piers Longridge, who is, one must admit, gay, finds women "so terrifying these days" and "expecting so much" (A Glass of Blessings); and Tom Mallow "marvels at the sharpness of even the nicest woman" (Less Than Angels). James feels "shut out" from the "feminine coziness" of Liz and Leonora (The Sweet Dove Died), while Rocky is opposed to the kind of women who "bring dry twigs and expect leaves to grow" (Excellent Women). Ultimately, however, where would we men be without "you ladies" to keep an eye on us?

Pym's women seem not only to perpetuate these stereotypes but to fuel them, aiding and abetting with great zest. They may display a certain cynicism about the view that "every woman is supposed to be able to turn her hand to an omelette" (A Few Green Leaves) but, deep down, they believe it. There is, especially, a certain animus between married and unmarried women that has its effect in turn on the stereotype of the spinster. It pervades the media as Mildred Lathbury (Excellent Women) listens to a program on the wireless that pits the two groups of women against each other. She does not know whether spinsters are really more inquisitive than married women, but she feels keenly her inadequacy and inexperience in a discussion with Helena, who is married. She thinks that surely wives, particularly Helena, the wife of Rockingham Napier, should not be too busy to cook and should be waiting at home when their husbands return from wars; certainly, if she were Rocky's wife …, the implication is. On the other hand, when Viola Dace proclaims that Marjorie Forbes has failed as a wife because she could not share Aylwin's work, Dulcie poses the possibility that the men could be at fault in such cases for choosing unsuitable wives (No Fond Return of Love). But in Less Than Angels, Catherine ponders the "general uselessness of women if they can't understand or reverence a man's work or even if they can," while Rhoda knows that Alaric and Catherine's cutting of rhubarb from his garden contain's a "subtlety" that only an unmarried woman can fully appreciate.

Allegra Gray, who is a widow, a category of women for which Mildred Lathbury has an inexplicable distrust, asks, "What do women do if they don't marry?" (Excellent Women), and Helena Napier wounds Mildred with her claim that the spinster's is "not a full life in the accepted sense." Mrs. Morris lacerates further with her proclamation that it is "not natural" for a woman to live alone without a husband. Though Mildred points out that women often have no choice, she knows that it is never the "excellent women" who marry but the Allegras and Helenas of the world. She and Dora try to believe that marriage is not everything, but they confess that they live by the fiction that they do not know anyone at the moment whom they want to marry. Mildred also muses about the new-found freedom of the wife of the president of the Learned Society, whose death has suddenly removed her from the burden of sleeping through its boring meetings. Unfortunately, Mildred realizes, he has left her nothing to occupy her old age, not even an understanding of his career of anthropology. Worse, perhaps, is the plight of the women who help their husbands through school only to be thrown out one day and to accept their banishment as fate (Less Than Angels). Nonetheless, her husband's key in the lock is the sound every wife loves most (A Glass of Blessings). But if Mildred ever writes a novel, it will be in the stream of consciousness mode and about an hour in the life of a woman at the sink (Excellent Women). The unmarried women stand judged of not "making the most of themselves" (No Fond Return of Love). They expect very little (almost nothing) and are not really first in anyone's life, easily becoming unwanted. Everything becomes their business, for they have none of their own. Probably their greatest problem is that they come to distrust their own instincts and intelligence and fall into accord with their stereotypes. Thus when Belinda thinks that Bishop Grote's hand lingers over hers, she dismisses her observation as the kind imagined by middle-aged spinsters (Some Tame Gazelle).

Pym women will let themselves endure "a real woman's evening" such as a silly play (A Glass of Blessings), eat "women's meals"—a scrap of cheese and some wilted lettuce in contrast to the "small plover" (Excellent Women) a man would cook for himself, and take trouble with such "a woman's fruit" as gooseberries or rhubarb, "sour and difficult things" (A Glass of Blessings). Through it all, their great strength is the ability to assume a "Patience-on-a-monument" attitude (Excellent Women). Everyone knows, after all, that men are more difficult to please, while women bear their burdens without complaining and accept blame, the "better and easier part" (Some Tame Gazelle). In A Few Green Leaves, Emma points out that an old woman would be too considerate to die on an outing. Minor rebellions against their lot only seem to cause more damage, as when Deirdre tells Tom that she loves him, despite the fact that women should never take the initiative (Less Than Angels). Yet the consequences of not acting may be worse. Thirty years too late, Belinda of Some Tame Gazelle discovers that Agatha married Hoccleve away from her by doing the asking. She now pushes her niece to get Reverend Donne by the same method.

As one of the older women observes in Less Than Angels, however much progress is made in the education of women, love cannot be kept out of their lives. Whether love or no, one can not say for sure, but something enables women to do "strange and wonderful and splendid" things for men, and their "love and imagination" do transform those otherwise "unremarkable beings" (Jane and Prudence). Why, then, Pym seems to ask, if women are so often able to "arrange things that men would have thought impossible" (No Fond Return of Love), do they suddenly become Wilmets and turn away from the sight of meat with "womanly delicacy" (A Glass of Blessings)?

Men also come in for their share of Pym's genial ridicule and humor. Victoria Glendinning speaks of her method, in Excellent Women, as "not the steel jab of feminism, merely a mild, fine irony toward the ways of the world." Yet she feels that the men are generally sticks and that it is Pym's women, not them, who matter. Philip Larkin finds the men often "insensitive," "automatically stingy," or "simply selfish" and concludes: "Miss Pym's novels may look like 'women's books,' but no man can read them and be quite the same again." The point is, however, that Pym's men are as trapped in their stereotypes as are the spinsters who outnumber them. She seems almost to excuse them as products of women's systematizing and stereotyping; for example, James feels "created" by Leonora at times in The Sweet Dove Died. Pym women proclaim men too weak to endure loneliness although they are less gregarious than women; they do not tend to be alone and usually do marry. Many of them habitually choose the wrong wife because they subconsciously do not want what is good for them (No Fond Return of Love). It is much more painful to see them in tears, as it would be far worse to think that a man, rather than Miss Limpsett, brought a vase of pussy willows into the office (A Glass of Blessings). They have little concentration and will-power and can not "get on" without the help of a strong woman (Less Than Angels). Perhaps this flaw accounts for Wilmet's being more at ease interrupting the conversations of men rather than women (A Glass of Blessings). The salient stereotype, however, is that men are like children. Also, they do not usually do things unless they like doing them, and they leave difficulties to be solved by other people or to solve themselves. Lacking subtlety and daintiness, they can not see the "dog beneath the skin," the "terrible depths," and thus are often taken in by a pretty face. They are "all alike" (Excellent Women) and "only want one thing" (Jane and Prudence), but, perhaps because Pym's characters are not the kind to talk about sex, men's desires are more often treated in terms of food. Graham Pettifer's utter selfishness can best be shown in A Few Green Leaves by his taking away all of the tomatoes, including the green ones; Emma is left to imagine his wife preparing them and to think of the small bit of fondling she and Graham once did on the grass.

Pym's men do not think about time—they simply expect their meals to appear and look upon them as their due. They must have meat, need eggs, a cooked breakfast and lots of food at all times, and could hardly be served tinned salmon. After dinner, they must be left to port and "manly conversation," and it is perfectly all right for them to talk shop while the women talk about domestic matters and babies. They even do "more manly shopping" (e.g., for paraffin and garden supplies) than women. They are "tweedy" and "pipe-smoking" and do carpentry on weekends. Landladies object to them on principle (No Fond Return of Love), and many of Pym's women dislike their pipes (Prudence in Jane and Prudence and Wilmet in A Glass of Blessings). Not "going in" for poetry much themselves, they do not like women who read. They also can not deal with women's effusiveness about their emotions. Tom, for example, of Less Than Angels, is very embarrassed when Catherine sings about the lotus and about finding Nirvana in his arms. If the question of blame is a real chicken-and-egg conundrum, one infers that Pym's women could not be in their present plights without large doses of their own conniving.

Occasionally, even the most accepting Pym woman gets a little huffy about men's insensitivity. Mildred refuses Bone's invitation to dinner because she knows that he could expect her to cook the meat, and she is sure that men are not so helpless and pathetic as women believe and that, on the whole, they run their lives better than women. Rowena, of A Glass of Blessings, wants to cook exotic dishes but is prevented from doing so by the "tyranny" and plebian tastes of her husband and children. At least her Harry is one of the nonintelligent men whom women find so much more comfortable than "tortured intellectuals." Then there are the quite reasonable questions of why they are so good at cooking but can not ever clean up behind themselves, and why men, especially those connected with the church, never seem to help women. Husbands take women's friends away and change them, often beyond recognition. Young Deirdre Swan is now clever and moody as her mother was before marriage to a "good dull man" and life in a suburb "steadied" her (Less Than Angels).

Worse, men remain enigmatical and unpredictable. Women never know what they are feeling and "can't hope to know all that goes on in a man's life or follow him with their loving thoughts." According to Rose Culver, a very minor character in The Sweet Dove Died and one who obviously has an ax to grind, the odd thing about men is that one never really knows them; just when women think true closeness has been achieved, they suddenly take flight. Even Mildred Lathbury wonders if any man is really worth such a burden after she offers to do Bone's index and proofs. Her answer is "probably not." Once in a while, a Pym woman will decide that a man should not expect her to do quite everything for him, and the Allegra Grays of the world—who do not belong to the category of "excellent women"—will give men the opportunity for self-sacrifice, their natures being so much less noble than those of women (Excellent Women). They are not supposed to notice what women wear, but Driver gives Jessie quite a start in Jane and Prudence when he recalls that his wife Constance had a dress very like the one she is wearing—it is Constance's dress. Once again, men display their penchant for being contrary.

The most obtuse man will sometimes let out that he knows women's tyranny; Archbishop Hoccleve, for example, offers the opinion that it is wiser for a man to stay single, for it then would not matter if he is late to lunch (Some Tame Gazelle). Men and women appear to muddle on, with people in general not seeming any happier or the relations between the sexes any better than they used to be (Less Than Angels, published in 1955). Indeed, the interrelations of men and women are often ridiculous, as Beatrix Howick points out in A Few Green Leaves, and there are times when men band against women and women against men. Grace Williton reaches the point of wondering why people bother to marry—marriage only causes trouble for them and for their kin (No Fond Return of Love).

Given the hiatus in the relationships between the sexes, women often seek friendships with other women and see them as a great comfort, a theme that pervades many of the novels, and the least pleasant of Pym's females are the ones who reject this view. Leonora of The Sweet Dove Died and Wilmet of A Glass of Blessings are the two major female characters seen as inhuman, unemotional, and "fossilized" by those around them. Leonora does not like to be kissed by another woman (or a man, for that matter), has little use for the "coziness" of female friends (whom she regards as foils to herself), and is contemptuous of the type of woman who is always too early. She is late for her lunch with Meg, but not as late as if she were meeting a man. (It is before a woman, nonetheless, that Leonora finally "breaks down.") Wilmet refuses to be one of those women who share confidences and tries to remain aloof from good Mary Beamish. She does later learn what a "splendid and wonderful thing" the friendship of a woman is when she is forgiven by Rowena for Harry's interest in her. Nevertheless, Pym's women are often catty about one another and about their sex in general and usually think the worst of each other. Letty in Quartet in Autumn sees Marcia's leaving her house to Norman as the perfect example of the unpredictability of women, and Letty is perhaps the kindest character in any of the novels. Leonora classes Rose Culver as one of those women who live alone and who do not always realize what they are saying (The Sweet Dove Died), and it is the women who assume that Harriet Bede's fur cape is actually "shaved coney" (Some Tame Gazelle). Once again, people are their own worst enemies, Pym suggests; there is nothing in the order of existence to mandate that the world or the two sexes be so. In the Pym world, bores and boors can be male and female, and men can out-spinster spinsters. Accordingly, we finish each book with the same sensation as that expressed by Sophia Ainger in An Unsuitable Attachment: "The lemon leaves had been unwrapped and there were the fragrant raisins at the heart."