Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym was a British novelist whose wry, understated comedies of English middle-class and church life have earned her a devoted following. Born in Oswestry, Shropshire, in 1913, she studied English at Oxford and worked at the International African Institute. After years of neglect, she was championed by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil. A Glass of Blessings follows Wilmet Forsyth, a comfortably-off young woman in 1950s London, whose attempts to find purpose lead her into unexpected emotional territory. Pym's fiction is characterised by its gentle irony, its sharp observation of social nuance, and its compassion for the quietly desperate. Pym died in 1980. Her audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers exquisitely observed, wryly funny English fiction — novels about the small dramas of ordinary life that are anything but small.