June 2, 1913

She had no competition in chronicling the social spectrum in which she specialized; she measured the interstitial lives of marginal, happy, women. Lives which are in-between only from the viewpoint of the overwhelming values of a bourgeois romanticism. The beauty of her work, like some Japanese art, lies in its accuracy. I refer of course to the novelist Barbara Pym (June 2, 1913 to January 11, 1980), author of novels like Quartet in August (1977). Pym is often compared to Jane Austen. The difference is more important: Austen wore the colors of that romanticism; Pym just put it to one side.

From a New York Times article, ("Pride and Perseverance," Laura Shapiro, June 21, 2013)
we learn that there were dissenters from the adulation Pym sometimes received in the press.

A. S. Byatt wrote, with a disdain for the term [romantics] that Pym would have found hilarious. “She has the ability to create a comfortable little world in which they can relax, locate themselves with ease, confirm their prejudices and enjoy their own superiority. But why the Ph.D. dissertations?” Peter Ackroyd said Pym had become a “cult” and added, “She is almost bafflingly popular in the United States.”

A taste for the fiction of Barbara Pym may be acquired, and forgotten, but the art in her novels is based on an accurate observation of the world, and suggests that niceness is sometimes beauty.

This article is where I found a line from Pym's diary: "What a bad sign it is to get the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse out of the library.” (Those were the days when reading poetry could assuage emotional turmoil.)

And this summary of Pym is from the same source:

[O]n some level, she simply didn’t want to be married and have children (she never cared for children, always preferring cats). She wanted to write books...