10. A Genetic and Biographical Analysis of Barbara Pym’s Companion Character
©2024 Jane Loughman, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0426.10
Jessie Morrow, the paid companion of the elderly Miss Doggett, is a prominent character in Barbara Pym’s fictional world; she appears in Jane and Prudence (1953), in the posthumously published novel Crampton Hodnet (1985), and in ‘So, Some Tempestuous Morn’ from the posthumous short story collection Civil to Strangers (1987). The order of publishing differs from the order in which Pym wrote these texts. The first time Pym wrote about Jessie was in a 1939–40 draft of Crampton Hodnet. She returned to the character ten years later while writing ‘So, Some Tempestuous Morn’ around 1950, and then again while writing Jane and Prudence in 1951. Pym changes Jessie’s personality significantly from her introduction in the Crampton Hodnet draft through to her final appearance in Jane and Prudence, the only contemporarily published text that features the character. In particular, Jessie is ever less tolerant of her profession and of her spinsterhood. Jessie is not the only companion character that Pym created; twenty-seven companions and governesses appear in her manuscripts (Wyatt-Brown 1992, 162). A ‘variant’ of Jessie Morrow, Deborah Wilde, appears in an unfinished draft called Something to Remember (1940) written just after Crampton Hodnet. Ten years later, in 1950, around the same time as Pym’s return to Jessie Morrow, Pym also adapted Something to Remember into a radio play for the BBC, changing Deborah’s name to Edith Gossett. In the span of roughly ten years, Pym’s companion character changed across the manuscripts and typescripts of these texts. There is minimal scholarship that examines the transformations, which may be due to the minimal endogenetic material that would be useful in a genetic analysis—drafts, typescripts and sketches—on the companion character in the ten-year period between the first and last iteration of Jessie. Expanding the endogenesis to include Pym’s diaries and letters facilitates a study of Pym’s creative process. On the ‘narrative’ level of narratology, the consideration of autobiographic material allows an interpretation of the characterisation changes that Pym made to Jessie and her companion ‘variants’. There is a tendency in studies of Pym and of her work to read her characters as stand-ins for Pym herself; Hazel Holt—friend and biographer of Pym—writes that Prudence of Jane and Prudence is ‘only a slightly distorted mirror image of Barbara herself’ (Holt 1990, 165). This chapter postulates that the companion character is not a mirror image of Pym, but rather a persona adopted on-the-page in tandem with the fictive personae Pym adopted off-the-page throughout her life.
From her days studying English at Oxford to her time as a Women’s Royal Navy (WRN) officer, Barbara Pym (1913–1980) documented her life and corresponded with acquaintances through various personae that she invented. Biographer Paula Byrne takes note of the many personae that Pym adopted in her daily life, or ‘off-the-page’ (Byrne 2021). In this way, Pym not only made a life of her fiction, but she also made a fiction of her life. Anthony Kaufman contends that Pym was able to distance herself from her own living experience to gain perspective and to transmute her painful experiences into comedy (Kaufman 1996, 187). The personae complicate biographical readings of Pym as readers of her personal writings may doubt whether the ‘real’ Barbara Pym is even known, and question if they ‘followed the emotional career of a character not entirely fictional, but not entirely Barbara Pym’ (Kaufman 1996, 189). While it seems that the personae were designed to provide Pym with detachment from her ‘true’ self, they nevertheless offer insights into Pym’s thoughts and feelings at the times she was writing. Pym herself said: ‘even when a novel isn’t obviously autobiographical […] a novelist […] can hardly avoid putting something of himself into his creations’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 98, fol. 66r). While there is a fictionalisation of her life in her autobiographic material, there also is ‘something of’ Pym in the personae, as she used them to channel the dissatisfactions she felt in her life. Stemming from her obsession with the narrative of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Pym created the companion character in her fiction, assuming the persona ‘on-the-page’. Pym then employed the sentiments of her off-the-page personae to experiment with different versions of the companion persona over the years. There is a symbiotic relationship between the companion characters and her off-the-page personae; the transformation in the companion characterisations aligns with the fluctuating outlooks on life Pym took on from 1938–51 as she used the detachment she derived from her personae to cope with change, heartbreak and spinsterhood.
Pym was a mid-century romantic comedy novelist who had many relationships but never married. Spinsterhood is a key subject of her novels; Pym’s romantic heroines are often unmarried women or ‘gentlewomen’ who keep themselves busy with their jobs or involvement in parish affairs. While some critics, in analysing Pym’s social comedies and romantic narratives, have deemed her a ‘twentieth-century Jane Austen,’ others see such a reading as reductive and as misinterpreting Pym. Margaret Bradham writes: ‘It is not about marriage and marriageability that Pym writes, but about spinsterhood and unmarriageability’ (1987, 31). The companion, a carer for an elderly person, is a particular kind of spinster Pym was interested in. There are recurring traits between the different ‘variants’ of the companion character throughout her work, one being that they are overlooked by their employer and others in their social circle. Another shared character trait is their timidity, yet this is a trait which evolves into confidence for the character of Jessie Morrow. In narratological studies, Uri Margolin has asked ‘how much can a character change and still remain the same individual […] in different fictional worlds […] is it one version per world, or are there rather one original individual and his counterparts in other worlds?” (Margolin 2007, 75). Viewing each Pym text as a different ‘world’,1 is Jessie Morrow of Crampton Hodnet a completely different character than Jessie in Jane and Prudence? Margolin puts forward two answers to this question, one that characters are ‘text-bound’ and ‘cannot be exported across text and world boundaries,’ the other being that we can export characters across texts by the same author, that the variations are ‘alternative elaborations of one common core’ (Margolin 2007, 70). The symbiotic relationship between Pym’s companions and her off-the-page personae complement the narratological argument that Pym’s companion characters are not ‘text-bound’ but are variants of ‘one common core’ as their characterisation transformations align with Pym’s own changing attitudes. Studying diaries and letters as endogenetic material reveal that characters and personae cannot be static and ‘text-bound’ but are susceptible to change, just like a person’s real-life growth and development. After an overview of the textual revisions to Pym’s companion characterisations across the drafts, sketches and typescripts of seven texts, I introduce a biographical reading of Pym to argue that the author’s diaries and letters can be used to amend the gaps in the genetic evolution of Pym’s companions’ characterisation.
The Genetic Evolution of the Companion Character
While Pym was a spinster, she was never a companion, and so there has been scholarly interest in the origin of Pym’s fascination for the social role. Janice Rossen and Anne M. Wyatt-Brown have sourced the fascination from Pym’s love for Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë; they see the abundance of companions, governesses, themes of unrequited love and heroines pining after aloof men in Pym’s work as hints of both an obsession and grappling with Brontë’s gothic romance. Rossen asserts that Brontë’s text ‘haunted’ Pym throughout her life (Rossen 1988, 137), and Wyatt-Brown attests that Pym ‘never outgrew her youthful obsession’ with the text (Wyatt-Brown 1992, 6), supporting their claims with biographical and genetic evidence. Rossen, for instance, notes that Pym referred to Jane Eyre as one of her favourite texts during a talk (Rossen 1988, 155), and that in her diaries she sometimes considered rewriting the text; in 1970, she asks herself if she could write ‘A modern version of Jane Eyre?’ (Pym 1984, 259). However, in their study of the connection between Pym and Jane Eyre, neither Rossen nor Wyatt-Brown give very significant consideration to Jessie (or her variant companion characters). Rossen does write convincingly that the 1940 rendition of Something to Remember—featuring the companion Deborah—is an attempt to rewrite Jane Eyre (Rossen 1988, 139), and Wyatt-Brown does take minor interest in Jessie in her Pym biography. Wyatt-Brown’s only conclusion for Jessie’s character change, though, is that ‘Pym’s view of her had changed over the years’ (Wyatt-Brown 1992, 80). Despite acknowledging the variations of Jessie as ‘spunky’ and ‘sensible’ (80), Wyatt-Brown insists that Pym ‘absorbed from Jane Eyre a belief that powerless women must inevitably submit to their adored but aloof, Rochester-like men’ (40). Wyatt-Brown forgets that Jessie never submits to her Rochester figure, but instead either refuses his half-hearted proposal in Crampton Hodnet or takes charge of her own life and seduces him into marriage in Jane and Prudence. In this section of the chapter, I track the genetic evolution of the companion characterisation in Pym’s work, beginning with a resigned spinster who sticks to what she knows, and evolving to a bold, daring woman who seeks change from her caregiving role. Using the endogenetic material of Pym’s fiction, I closely read Pym’s textual edits—some of which are excluded from final, published versions—that reveal Pym’s intentions behind the characterisations.
Pym began writing Crampton Hodnet in 1939, but the typescript was abandoned after 1940 and was only published posthumously 45 years later by Holt. The story follows the tribulations of three pairings in North Oxford, including curate Stephen Latimer’s failed proposal to companion Jessie Morrow. While staying at Leamington Lodge with the spinster and her employer Miss Doggett, Stephen makes his proposal on a spur of the moment, inspired by the notion that ‘he might do worse than marry Miss Morrow’ (Pym 2022b, 81). She rejects his proposal since he only regards her with ‘respect and esteem’ but does not love her (116). She sees her standards as so high that she cannot envisage herself in a loving marriage (118) since, as a companion, she believes she is ‘looked upon as a piece of furniture’ (21). Miss Doggett is often condescending to Jessie, saying she does ‘not know the world as’ she does (163), which undermines Jessie’s ‘definite personality’ (2). Yet Jessie is ‘able to look upon herself and her surroundings with detachment’ (2), which allows her to make bold and witty comments that are overlooked. Because of her detachment, she does not suffer heartbreak from the failed proposal, and instead sees herself as a ‘lucky woman’ to be concerned only with ‘the trivial round, the common task’ (198). However, in the typescript draft of the novel (Bodleian MS. PYM 10) one can find a line added by Pym to a section in chapter 16 (omitted by Holt in the published edition of the story): ‘Miss Morrow began to wonder whether he had fallen in love with somebody, but after racking her brains without success, she decided it must be the thought of Paris that was responsible for his odd behaviour’ (Fig. 10.1). This line in the manuscript strengthens a reading of Jessie as covertly preoccupied with romance, accepting her position as an unmarried companion with an air of resignation. Jessie in the final chapter of Crampton Hodnet can be understood as having a fatalist view; nothing will ever change for her as she listens to the same romantic programme on the radio that she did at the beginning of the novel (Pym 2022b, 3; 270), and she agrees with Miss Doggett that there is no ‘change and decay’ at Leamington Lodge (271).
Fig. 10.1 Barbara Pym, Crampton Hodnet typescript (1939), Bodleian MS. PYM 10, fol. 213r.
Written in 1940 but incomplete and unpublished, Something to Remember (Bodleian MS. PYM 11) features another companion character who accepts her spinsterhood with resignation. Deborah Wilde takes on a new role as ‘companion-secretary’ to Mrs Otway, although Deborah thinks the title ‘too grand’ for the post (fol. 07r). As evident from her first-person narration, she has low self-esteem, and complementing that are her low expectations for her life in her new job: ‘My life would be uneventful but comfortable […] Oh, yes, I was a lucky woman’ (08r). When Deborah ponders on her new job, she realises that ‘the thought of being a companion-secretary frightened me now and I didn’t want to think about it, so that I and in any case one could hardly imagine that there would be anything exciting about it’ (Fig. 10.2). However, Pym crossed this sentence out, and she replaced Deborah’s feelings of fright over her new role with: ‘I felt rather heavy and resigned, which is perhaps the most suitable feeling a companion can have’ (21r). Resignation and heaviness better characterise Deborah as she broods over sad memories, imagines alternate lives and enters bouts of melancholy throughout the text. Deborah believes this is the existence she ought to have: ‘When you are past the early twenties, I think you do not any longer rebel against things’ (17r). Her resignation carries over into her prospects of love. Deborah still grieves over her failed relationship with Reverend Bernard Hoad, to whom she was once engaged, but who jilted her. Now, she ponders falling in love with Mr Otway, admitting it ‘would be like falling in love with one of the stuffed birds’, but still ‘might be soothing’ (68r). After heartbreak, Deborah now seeks comfort, not passionate love, settling for ‘soothing’ but unrequited love. Mrs Otway sees potential for Deborah as a suitable, ‘awfully good clergyman’s wife’ (69r), but the overall gloom of the unfinished draft does not present hope to the reader.
Fig. 10.2 Barbara Pym, Something to Remember (1940), Bodleian MS. PYM 11, fol. 21r.
Following Jessie of Crampton Hodnet and Deborah, and throughout the war, there are no substantial drafts or typescripts of stories featuring companion characters. The only possibly wartime endogenetic material featuring a companion is an undated Pym notebook (Bodleian MS. PYM 90) where one can find a sketch of a character similar to Deborah. Wyatt-Brown names this notebook ‘Notes for a Wartime Novel’ in her critical biography (Wyatt-Brown 1992, 165), and it is most likely from 1944 (Pym stated that her heroine is ‘18 in 1889’ and ‘73 in 1944’ [Bodleian MS. PYM 90, fol. 09r]). Beatrice Gossage, or ‘Gossy’ (09r) looks back on her past as a ‘governess and companion’ who works for ‘Lord Edge’ (10r). At 18, she was in love with the eldest son of the Lord’s family, ‘Julian’ (15r). Like Deborah, Gossy is a clergyman’s daughter who is melancholic and does not feel a whole sense of self: she relates to the stag’s head on the wall of the home ‘whose melancholy eyes seemed to ask/cry to her—oh where is the rest of me—a question she had sometimes asked herself’ (13r). In 1945, Pym began drafting a second version of what would become her first published novel, Some Tame Gazelle (1950). She wrote the first version in the 1930s but returned to the story as the war came to an end to update it and make it ‘acceptable’ (Wyatt-Brown 1992, 145) In the second version, Pym reuses a character from an earlier story, her ‘Home Front Novel,’ which she drafted at the beginning of the war but never attempted to publish. The character is Connie Aspinall, who in ‘Home Front’ is not a companion but Agnes Grote’s friend who lives with her (Bodleian MS PYM 8, fol. 15r). Connie is ‘meek and wispy about the head’ (36r), and while she occasionally feels ‘defiant’ (28r), she is resigned, but not over a lack of love in her life. She often daydreams of living in Belgravia (61r) and away from her overbearing housemate. Interestingly, in Some Tame Gazelle, Connie is a former companion who used to live in Belgrave Square working for Lady Grudge but is now living with her elderly relative Edith Liversidge, away from Belgravia. While she is not named as a companion of Edith, it seems she has adopted the role; Edith calls on Connie ‘as if she were a dog’ (Pym 2022d, 25). Harriet views Connie as a ‘decayed gentlewoman’ (10), and Belinda cannot help but see ‘something elegiac about poor Connie’ as she plays piano with a ‘melancholy air’ (37). It is evident that she is nostalgic over ‘her past glories of her life’ in Belgravia (126), so Connie of Some Tame Gazelle is similar to Deborah in her melancholic nostalgia. Connie is also close to Jessie of Crampton Hodnet in that she is overlooked, yet she strays from Jessie’s fatalism and instead accepts a surprising proposal from Bishop Grote (241). Connie was not the bishop’s first choice, as he originally proposed to the novel’s protagonist, Belinda, and got rejected (225), yet she believes that when he first saw her ‘he knew it was to be’ (241).
In Pym’s Excellent Women (1952), which Pym began drafting in 1949, there is a minor character, Miss Jessop, who is not explicitly described as a companion but could be interpreted as one as she acts like a subordinate to the elderly Mrs Bone, with whom she lives. She is even more meek than Connie; she does not say a single word throughout the entire text, and only makes a ‘quavering sound which might have been a “Yes” or “No”’ (Pym 2009, 167). It is interesting that Pym brings in a companion-like character who is so quiet and submissive, as her characterisations of the companion throughout the early 1950s gradually begin to show more rebellion and frustration instead of resignation.
In 1950, Pym adapted Something to Remember into a play for BBC Radio, the script of which remains unpublished (Bodleian MS. PYM 96 fols.193–229) and which contains hints of a reference to the 1944 ‘Gossy’ sketch and a similar melancholic air to previous versions of the companion. In the radio adaptation, Edith Gossett, a companion employed by Miss Lomax, is resigned, and she is regarded as part of the furniture: ‘She goes with all that delicious Edwardian and Victorian bric-a-brac’ (219r). While she is not as formidable as Miss Doggett, Miss Lomax still looks down on Edith enough for it to sting, such as when she implies Edith lacks a ‘forceful personality’ (223r). However, like Jessie in Crampton Hodnet, Edith does have a bold side, seen only when she is talking to Simon Sheldonian: after Simon asks, ‘What can I say to that?’, Edith replies ‘I thought you were going into the Diplomatic Service […] You ought to know what to say’ (220r). While Jessie and Connie get proposed to, Edith instead gets an offer from her eligible bachelor to be his mother’s companion, much to her surprise: ‘Oh, I see’ (227r). In Crampton Hodnet, Jessie also replies to Stephen Latimer with an ‘Oh, I see’ when he proposes to her (Pym 2022b, 115); the aloof response reveals how Jessie holds back an overt show of her feelings in her state of detachment. Edith also masks her feelings to Simon, but her appeal to the stag’s head shows her disappointment over the lack of a proposal. In their first exchange years before, Edith says ‘I suppose I’ve more feeling than that old stag’s head on the wall’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 96 fol. 220r), then years later when they reunite, she refers to that stag’s head again after Simon asks if she could be his mother’s companion (227r). Simon does not recall the stag’s head, nor did he recognise Edith at first when they reunited (225r). Since Edith’s memory of their first exchange is stronger, Edith had evidently been more invested in Simon than he had been in her, so she was let down by his job offer. If the Beatrice Gossage sketch from 1944 mentions Beatrice sharing an affinity with a stag’s head, perhaps her successor Edith is also ‘connected’ to her own stag’s head, showing a similar detachment style as Jessie from Crampton Hodnet by saying ‘I don’t think the stag’s head would have approved of [the job offer]’ (227r).
In Pym’s handwritten notebooks from the 1950s, there are notes that show Pym’s thoughts of returning to Jessie Morrow and Miss Doggett ten years after writing Crampton Hodnet. In MS. PYM 41, a notebook dated from 1950, Pym wrote ‘New novel. An old lady with a companion, who is blamed for the modern slackening of moral stands’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 41, fol. 08v), a call-back to Miss Doggett’s treatment of Jessie in Crampton Hodnet. A few pages later in the same notebook, among ideas for Jane and Prudence, Pym sketched her short story ‘So, Some Tempestuous Morn’:
a story about Oxford Love.
A story ab and North Oxford.
First of all the companion and the
peonies too ravaged to
decorate the church
‘Ravaged?’—Miss D. frowned (Bodleian MS. PYM 41, fol. 14r).
Pym used elements of this sketch in the short story, which became a retelling of the opening scene of Crampton Hodnet, but also remained unpublished until the 1980s. The four typescripts of ‘So, Some Tempestuous Morn’ (MS. PYM 94, fols. 149r–204r) are undated but are likely to be from 1950 considering the sketch in her 1950 literary notebook. Holt published the version of the story in the fourth typescript in 1987. Like the Jessie of Crampton Hodnet, the Jessie of ‘So, Some Tempestuous Morn’ feels that she is a marginal figure in Oxford life, ‘a dim figure on the fringe of the University melting away into North Oxford’ (199r). Miss Doggett is still unaccommodating of Jessie’s witty remarks in the short story, calling her comments ‘little lapses’ and altogether unsuitable (193r), but, beyond her sassy comments, Jessie shows more signs of rebellion against Miss Doggett’s views than her predecessor. After delivering flowers to the church, Jessie thinks of a place to have morning coffee and cake, an activity Miss Doggett denounces as ‘time-wasting and self-indulgent’, to purposefully ‘waste time and be self-indulgent’ (199r). The first typescript and the fourth typescript of ‘So, Some Tempestuous Morn’ have different endings, and the differences have a significant impact on a reading of Jessie’s character as being rebellious. In the first typescript, Pym describes Jessie joining the luncheon crowd in the garden with a ‘swaggering air’ (158r), suggesting she has built up her self-confidence despite the snide remarks of Miss Doggett in front of the ‘strikingly handsome clergymen’ (150r). However, in the fourth typescript’s ending, and thus in the published version, Jessie follows the crowd ‘solemnly round the garden’ (204r; Pym 2022a, 338). In this version’s ending, she comes across as an even more melancholic, resigned spinster than Deborah or Connie, even though, throughout ‘So, Some Tempestuous Morn,’ Jessie is antsier over her role than her predecessors. Holt chose to publish the fourth typescript and, thus, the ending that uses the word ‘solemnly’. Holt’s decision is notable as the confident, arrogant nature of ‘swaggering air’ from the first typescript speaks more to the final iteration of the Jessie/companion character.
Contemporaneous readers of Pym first met Jessie Morrow in Jane and Prudence. There are no drafts of the novel in Pym’s archive, but as previously mentioned, Jessie and other Jane and Prudence characters appear in Pym’s literary notebooks. In a sketch detailing the ending of the novel, Pym wrote:
At the end a scene where Miss
Doggett uncovers a scandal—
Miss Morrow and Fabian have
been having an affair*—he
has been running her and
Prudence at the same time.
Almost imperceptibly Miss M.
has taken the place of Constance,
his late wife.
*Miss D. is vague—doesn’t really
know all but wishes she did (Bodleian MS. PYM 42, fol. 12r).
As the sketch suggests, the Jessie of Jane and Prudence is the most rebellious of all her variants; dissatisfied with her job as a companion, she takes action into her own hands and seduces the widower Fabian Driver to bag him as a husband. She sees her job as ‘outmoded,’ especially since Miss Doggett has ‘no need’ of her (Pym 2022c, 25). As a friend of the late Constance Driver, Jessie knew Constance’s husband Fabian well and ‘had always loved him’ (150) but did not realise so until a year after Constance’s passing. According to Fabian, Jessie ‘appeared always in [Constance’s] shadow, a thing without personality of her own, as neutral as her clothes’ (54), resembling Pym’s previous characters who are undermined and perceived as lacking in personality. Fabian does understand, however, that Jessie has an ‘unexpectedly sharp tongue’ (117), which she uses to get his romantic attention. She refuses to remain in her social position as a mere marginal onlooker on society: ‘I don’t intend to be a distressed gentlewoman’ (134). In an act of defiance, she not only lies to Miss Doggett about her whereabouts for her afternoon off, but also wears Constance’s old blue velvet dress when she goes to visit and seduce Fabian, asserting her newfound self: ‘I wondered […] if I would have the courage to call on you. Well, I did have, so here I am’ (151). Her boldness reaches its peak once Jessie calculatingly decides to spill tea on her competitor for Fabian, Prudence, to make her leave a social gathering (186). Ruthless, sharp, and even frightening to Fabian (215), Jessie of Jane and Prudence is very different from Pym’s first companion characterisation in Crampton Hodnet ten years before.
While she is still underestimated by her wider circle, Pym’s companion character finally breaks out of her fatalistic mindset and makes a change to her tedious existence in Jane and Prudence. Jessie does not submit to a Rochester figure, departing from Wyatt-Brown’s reading, and instead finds a courage inside herself to seduce Fabian. But what prompted the characterisation change, the genetic evolution of a companion from resigned and melancholically nostalgic, to bold, determined and ready to uproot her life? Emily Stockard studies Pym’s life and work through themes of change, arguing that Pym adhered to a ‘principle of continuity’; she was always in tune with the past, present and future, acknowledging that change, not stasis, is the key to continuity (Stockard 2021, 14). In order to maintain a sense of continuity in times of change, Pym created personae to ‘[accommodate] herself to major alterations in her life’ (63) such as her first love, her time in the WRN and her first major heartbreak, and to channel her true feelings. A study of the off-the-page personae through Pym’s letters and diaries illuminates the fluctuating attitudes to life that Pym adopted and which she then applied to the variants of a ‘common core’, Jessie Morrow. In the following section, I explore Pym’s personal archives and biography to track the symbiosis between the changes in Pym’s life and the changes in the companion character.
The Fictive Personae of Barbara Pym
The first of Pym’s fictive personae was created out of Pym’s wish to detach from her ‘innocent’ self to gain confidence around men (Byrne 2021, 64). ‘Sandra,’ short for ‘Cassandra,’ was a flirty, bold, romantic Oxford student (Byrne 2021, 64). Pym recorded her adventures as Sandra in her Oxford diary labelled ‘the adventures of the celebrated Barbara M C Pym during the years 1932–1933’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 101, inside front cover), in which she documented her life like a story, with Sandra as the main protagonist. For a new term in 1933, she considered taking the opportunity ‘to change entirely!!’ in ‘intoxicating’ Oxford (Bodleian MS. PYM 101, fol. 05v), and in her new form she flirted with many Oxford men, including one with whom she would become life-long friends. Henry Harvey, or ‘Lorenzo’ according to Sandra, dominated her diary, including in her poems from ‘Sandra to Lorenzo’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 101, fols. 58r–59v). Pym had a tumultuous on-off romance with Harvey (see Byrne 2021), but it was ultimately an unrequited love; Stockard writes that Pym made use of her Sandra persona ‘to cordon off and observe with irony the part of her that suffered’ (Stockard 2021, 114). Long after their Oxford days, Pym maintained a friendship with Harvey, often writing to (and pining after) him. When Harvey moved to Finland in 1934, Pym started a new diary, and created the persona of ‘Pymska’, a Finnish version of Barbara (Byrne 2021, 126) and a ‘more sophisticated person than Sandra’ (Byrne 2021, 159). The Pymska persona, like Sandra, was another means through which to flirt with men and to cope with unreturned feelings from her first significant love, Harvey.2
Pymska evolved into ‘Paavikki Olafsson’,3 another Finnish role. Pym impersonated Paavikki when meeting Julian Amery in 1937, dropping the act almost immediately. Pym became infatuated with Amery, and when they embarked on a fleeting affair, she revealed her habit of acting out roles; he wrote in a letter to her asking ‘When am I going to see you again my “vaend at Elske” Vicki […] will you be a Shropshire spinster? a Finnish student? or just a novelist up to see her publisher?’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 147, fol. 01v). The romance with Amery did not last as he left for Spain to work as a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War in 1938. She kept up the continental Paavikki persona, shortening the name to Vikki, as she moved to Poland in 1938 to be a governess before soon returning to England due to rising tensions (Byrne 2021, 223). In Poland, she started ‘a new life’ as Vikki (Byrne 2021, 223), wearing her ‘Vikki Olafsson macintosh and battered Austrian hat’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 104, fol. 135r). Yet she would continue to pine, missing Amery, and was homesick, writing that ‘Vikki was temperamental—but after cigarettes, some Mozart and a Brandenburg concerto felt better’ (139r). At the same time as she was inhabiting the role of Vikki, Pym adopted the contrasting ‘Miss Pym’ when writing letters in the style of poet Stevie Smith. Unlike the romantic and charming Sandra, Pymska and Vikki, ‘Miss Pym’ is a ‘spinster lady who was thought to have been disappointed in love’ (Pym 1984, 67). In a letter to Harvey and her friend Robert Liddell in 1938, Pym described Miss Pym in a vexed tone as an ‘old brown spinster horse’ or ‘old-stuffed shirt’ who is ‘all shut up like oyster, or like clam’ (71). Despite her recent romance with Amery, Pym persisted with conjuring up Miss Pym as a ‘crabby’ spinster (71). There is an element of truth to ‘Miss Pym’, of course, as the letters are ‘a study in masking and revealing emotional trauma by means of self-mockery’ over Pym’s failed romances (Stockard 2021, 134). She used the comedic spinster persona in her writings to help her endure her disappointments of losing Harvey and Amery.
‘Miss Pym’s’ complaints of spinsterhood continued into the war years as Pym pined after Amery and when she was later jilted by another lover, Gordon Glover. As her relationship with Amery faded, she met the married, philandering Glover in 1941, and had an affair with him in 1942 (Byrne 2021, 332). Glover’s jilting caused Pym so much heartbreak she destroyed the diaries that had thoroughly documented their time together (Byrne 2021, 332–34). She did capture ‘Miss Pym’s’ thoughts after the fact in a diary: ‘And the bewildered English spinster, now rather gaunt and toothy, but with a mild, sweet expression, may hardly know herself’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 108, fol. 40r). Prompted by her heartbreak, Pym joined the WRN, or ‘Wrens,’ in 1943 to ‘take a measure of control over her wartime life’ (Stockard 2021, 280). She constructed another persona, ‘Wren Pym,’ which she used as a title on a new page in her diary (see Fig. 10.3). There is a clear divide between Barbara and Wren Pym: on a solitary walk, prompted by the sounds of Bach, she returned to her ‘old gothick self—the self that I’ve had to put off while I’ve been here’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 109, fols. 30v–30r). She noted how easy it was to adopt her alter ego—‘in fact I seem to have adapted myself quite happily to this life’ (30r)—and later in the diary expressed her excitement in the idea that she ‘can do something I thought I couldn’t do before’ (69v). Even though she was often homesick, Pym’s time as Wren Pym begins to encourage her to move on from Glover: the Wrens had ‘at least given me a change, less opportunity to think of G […] and the feeling that I am trying to do something about it’ (71r–71v). Following the war, despite exhibiting admirable independence in working during the war and taking on a new office job in 1946 (Byrne 2021, 379), Pym’s negative ‘Miss Pym’ mindset regarding spinsterhood remained; in a letter to Harvey, she wrote ‘Maybe I shall be able to keep my illusions as it doesn’t look like I shall ever get married’ (Pym 1984, 180). She did not write about her life very much following her mother’s death in 1946. She became a published author in 1950, and, as she began to write Jane and Prudence in 1951, had an affair with a married man (Byrne 2021, 426).
Fig. 10.3 Barbara Pym, Diary (1943), Bodleian MS. PYM 109, fol. 44v.
Pym’s adoption of different roles helped her to take control of her life at points of change, to ironically distance herself from herself, and to explore parts of herself she did not know. Stockard writes that, in this way, Pym was aware of the ‘relation between the roles one takes on or finds oneself in and the alterations that these roles undergo as consequent to changes in one’s life, alterations necessary to form life’s continuity’ (Stockard 2021, 131). Some of her personae evolved into new versions, such as from Sandra to Pymska, while others were used simultaneously, such as Vikki and Miss Pym; Pym adhered to a principle of continuity, staying in tune with her true self as she inhabited many lives on- and off-the-page. As Kaufman writes, Pym ‘feels the emotion and yet at the same time can observe herself with ironic self-awareness and, thoroughly accustomed even this early to viewing herself and her world through literature, can see herself as acting out a fiction’ (Kaufman 1996, 191–2). Wren Pym was the most self-aware persona of Pym’s fictionalised life, as she laughed at the prospect of ‘a grown up person playing a fantastic game’ being considered to work overseas: ‘You see Reader, I am now completely myself again—the most unlikely person to be in the Wrens’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 109, fol. 84v). Yet, I agree with Stockard in that it is Wren Pym that lends Pym an ‘expanded sense of herself’ (Stockard 2021, 295), a new sense of self that Pym then lends to her on-the-page persona, the companion.
Pym never worked as a companion, but she did fleetingly joke in a letter to Liddell in 1937 that she could work as a companion for Harvey’s partner’s mother, listing her qualifications: ‘I am […] a gentlewoman, cultured, a good needlewoman, very clean and pleasant-tempered’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 153, fol. 190r). As Pym begins to write Crampton Hodnet the year following her finding out that Harvey will marry his partner Elsie (Byrne 2021, 195), it is possible to interpret this joke as the origins of the Jessie/companion character. Thus, the companion is a persona Pym took on, more separate from herself than her off-the-page fictive personae, but nonetheless a character influenced by her real-life personae and used to grapple with strong feelings of frustration and loneliness. In Crampton Hodnet, Mr Latimer proposes to Jessie on the grounds of ‘respect and esteem’ (Pym 2022b, 116), a phrase that Harvey used in a letter to Pym (Byrne 2021, 246). Jessie’s rejection of the half-hearted proposal and her emotional detachment funnels Pym’s wish to move on from her unattainable infatuations of Amery and Harvey and to distract herself from her emotions as ‘Vikki.’ However, Deborah Wilde’s lack of confidence and nostalgia over past loves in Something to Remember, written around the same time as Crampton Hodnet, captures ‘Miss Pym’s’ continued resignation over her spinsterhood. Channelling the nostalgia of both ‘Gossy’ from the 1944 sketch and Connie from Some Tame Gazelle, as well as the emotional detachment and resignation of Edith from the 1950 radio adaptation of Something to Remember, allowed Pym to look back on her own life after heartbreak over Glover while distracting herself as Wren Pym or as a post-war working lady trying to get published. In a 1941 diary entry, Pym felt melancholic and nostalgic, quoting Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’: ‘So, some tempestuous morn in early June […]’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 146, fol. 24r). Pym returned to the Arnold imagery again in 1950 in ‘So, Some Tempestuous Morn’ but not to express melancholy: ‘Tempestuous morn’ speaks to the stormy morning in North Oxford but also to the tempestuous, conflicted feelings of Jessie over her social role across the typescript drafts. Jessie resolved these feelings in Jane and Prudence after Pym came to a revelation in her fictionalised life while working as a Wren in the war years: that she could adopt even ‘an unnatural or uncongenial role if required’ (Stockard 2021, 295). Becoming Wren Pym was a way for Pym to distract herself from Glover, but she came away from the role believing that she could ‘do something I thought I couldn’t do before’, even if she was ‘a grown up playing a fantastic game’. Her newfound courageousness as Wren Pym is the key turning point for the characterisation change in Jessie between Crampton Hodnet and Jane and Prudence; being a companion is what is natural, comfortable and suitable to Jessie, but frustrated after years of being in the margins, she decides to assume a new role in Jane and Prudence as a spunky, bold woman who finds love for herself.
Pym’s fictive personae, therefore, serve to make up for the lack of endogenetic material on the character of the companion in the war years, and contribute to a fuller image of Pym’s fictionalising of her own life. However, the subsequent return to the Miss Pym mindset shows that she was still bitter over Glover. Pym writes Fabian, a ‘Gordonish character’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 41, fol. 11r) into Jane and Prudence, and Jessie seduces him with her newfound sense of self. It is possible that Pym’s affair with married man Thomas Kendrick in 1951 (Byrne 2021, 426) led to Pym’s adoption of another off-the-page persona, such as the ‘Other Woman’, who she then channelled into her final iteration of her on-the-page companion persona in Jane and Prudence, but there is a lack of personal material that might confirm this reading. We can argue, though, that via the ‘principle of continuity’, which kept Pym in tune with her past to face change (Stockard 2021, 14), the writer returned to sentiments from the early 1940s that her personae had expressed in Crampton Hodnet and Something to Remember, and used them for Connie during the war, and Edith Gossett, the Jessie of ‘So, Some Tempestuous Morn’ and the Jessie of Jane and Prudence ten years later. She employed the Miss Pym-esque resignation in the companions of Some Tame Gazelle and the Something to Remember radio play before transforming it into the Wren Pym-esque ambitious outlook hinted at in the Jessie of ‘So, Some Tempestuous Morn’ but fully realised by the Jessie of Jane and Prudence.
Pym purposefully writes about her life as if it were a novel. She addresses a ‘Reader’, expecting her personal writing to be read (Bodleian MS. PYM 109, fol. 84v), and structures some diary entries as if they are chapters in a novel: ‘I seemed to be thinking of [Gordon] less… But… Tuesday April 6th I spoilt it by dreaming of him’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 108, fol. 37v). Her use of personae both in her personal documents and in the endogenetic material of her literary work blurs the lines between her fiction and her reality. Her attempt to fictionalise her life shows her eagerness to live a ‘writable’ life: she once wrote that ‘the novelist has to do a good deal of improving upon life at all stages in a plot. […] Somethings do not happen at all, but in a novel they must be made to happen’ (Bodleian MS. PYM 98, fol. 64r). It is fitting, then, that Pym’s narratological techniques for her character variants follow the ‘principle of continuity’ across texts. While Pym and her companion personae were once resigned, heartbroken, and hopeless about their spinsterhood, they learn to make things happen, to take charge of their lives as if they are the writers of their own stories. The author does more than act in different roles as she plays ‘a fantastic game’; she makes a memorable life that complements her memorable fiction.
Works Cited
Amery, Julian, MS. PYM 147 (fols. 1–50), Letters from, and Newspaper Cuttings Concerning Julian Amery, 1937–1948, n.d., Archive of Barbara Mary Crampton Pym, Oxford: Bodleian Libraries.
Bradham, Margaret, C. (1987), ‘Barbara Pym’s Women’, World Literature Today, 61.1: 31–37.
Byrne, Paula (2021), The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym (London: William Collins).
Holt, Hazel (1990), A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (London: Macmillan).
Kaufman, Anthony (1996), ‘A Life like A Novel: Pym’s “Autobiography” as Fiction’, Journal of Modern Literature, 20.2: 187–97.
Margolin, Uri (2007), ‘Character’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. by David Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 66–79.
Pym, Barbara, MS. PYM 8, Unfinished Manuscript Draft of ‘Home Front Novel’ (Civil to Strangers, 1987), written Oct. 1939–Oct 1939, Archive of Barbara Mary Crampton Pym, Oxford: Bodleian Libraries.
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1 Although it could be argued that Pym’s texts form one fictional world together since characters like Mildred Lathury from Excellent Women makes appearances in other texts, I use Margolin’s word ‘world’ to study characterisation changes across genetic drafts through a narratological lens.
2 The persona being Finnish and Harvey being in Finland shows that Pym was still not over Harvey.
3 The persistence of the Finnish inspiration for the personae reveals an ongoing infatuation with Harvey.