About the only fact that the non-fan ever remembers about the career of Barbara Pym (1913–80) is its abrupt truncation in 1963. The news came in a letter from the publishing house Jonathan Cape, declining the current manuscript, An Unsuitable Attachment—this was published posthumously—and informing its author that her books had never made any money and were becoming ever harder to sell. In the end Miss Pym had her revenge: perseverance and the efforts of celebrity admirers realized a spectacular late flourishing. But the throwing-over by Cape’s no-nonsense Mr. Wren Howard inflicted lasting damage. There followed a decade-and-a-half-long pageant of inner distress that manifested itself in everything from her grievance-strewn correspondence to a vilely colored milk jelly christened “Maschler Pudding” in honor of Tom Maschler, the Cape editor who had supposedly done her wrong. Most writers turn out to have some kind of psychological “wound.” If Dickens’s was the blacking factory and Mealy Potatoes, then Pym’s was the sheet of foolscap paper that lay quivering in her hand on a bitter spring morning in the month that the Beatles released their first LP.

By the time of Cape’s rejection letter, Pym, then approaching fifty, had published six works of fiction, beginning with Some Tame Gazelle in 1950 and ending with No Fond Return of Loveeleven years later. All of them were well-received; they sold modestly and were thought to give off a distinctive atmospheric scent, in which low-key middle-class English life, clerical backgrounds, and