Pym was.... the author of six modestly successful novels that had been appearing at regular intervals until she sent the seventh to her publisher in 1963 and received an unexpected blow. George Wren Howard, the co-founder of the publishing house Jonathan Cape, acknowledged that her books were not losing money, but he said they weren’t turning a profit, either. He didn’t ask for a revision; he didn’t encourage her to send her next manuscript. He simply didn’t want to publish her any longer. And, as Pym discovered, neither did anyone else. She spent the next 14 years getting rejection letters — including several for Quartet in Autumn, which would end up shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977....[This change in fortune began early in 1977 when], the Times Literary Supplement published a symposium on the most over- and underrated writers of the twentieth century, and Barbara Pym was the only writer to be named twice in the latter category-by Philip Larkin (long a friend and encourager) and Lord David Cecil. On 14 February the publishers Macmillan told her they were accepting the novel they had currently under consideration, Quartet in Autumn. This fine work, by general consent her best, tells of four people on the verge of retirement. It is more sombre than her earlier books, with a blacker humour, but in its final uplift confirms the voice that had always been hers. It was shortlisted for the Booker prize, and a period began of a limelight she had not known before, including her election as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1979.
The world Barbara Pym described with a loving objectivity, contained village life and old maids; it included tea rituals and of course, cats.
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