The end of life as we know it, or the beginning?

One of my book groups has a plan: to explore women writers of the mid-twentieth century whose work we don’t know. This has brought me to my first experience of Barbara Pym. Pym was writing novels from the mid 1930s but didn’t find a publisher until 1950 after which she enjoyed some success in that decade. After 1961, however, that old trouble of finding a publisher returned and no new work appeared until the publication of Quartet in Autumn in 1977. This novel was nominated for the Booker Prize and heralded a resurgence of interest in Pym’s work. This is the novel that we chose to read.

Quartet in Autumn follows the lives of four aging work colleagues, Letty, Marcia, Edwin and Norman. It is never clear what they do; what matters is how they interact. They are all the same age, but Letty and Marcia, being women, retire earlier and are confronted with the big questions of what to do with life as a single woman, now considered elderly. This is the 1970s when, of course, anyone over sixty might automatically be viewed as old. Letty, who has been anticipating a move to the country to live with her oldest friend, must change her plans when the friend decides on remarriage instead. What Letty cannot countenance is moving to the local old people’s home so she can still be near her friend. But what to do instead? Through Letty, more than any other character, Pym shows us that aging is more of an external than an internal phenomenon. Letty can’t quite understand how she got to be so old when she doesn’t feel it.

Nowadays many people have a very different attitude to old age. Sixty is the new forty and all that. Retirement is often seen as an opportunity for new adventures rather than just a rest, a beginning more than an end. Letty knows this although Marcia struggles with it. In 2023 we would no doubt be quick to offer a diagnosis for Marcia’s social awkwardness, but none of her friends do so beyond acknowledging and accepting her ‘oddness’. All the characters are quirky and sympathetic and beautifully drawn, inviting us into their world even if they don’t know it.

Above all, Pym’s style is warm and witty, at times funny and always poignant. She evokes the mid 1970s with striking precision, a world so like our own and yet so removed. One that views men and women differently, even as it illustrates the shared impacts of loneliness and aging from a range of perspectives. Quartet is a smiley kind of book, even when things don’t go as planned for the protagonists. With this novel, Pym found a whole new readership in the 1970s and her followers continue to celebrate her work today.