Whispers of wit but unlucky in love

A Very Private Eye: Barbara Pym, An Autobiography in Letters and Diaries, (Macmillan, £12.95) WITH LETTERS, diaries, excellent notes and an impeccable index, the presentation of Barbara Pym's biography is just about perfect. The only puzzle is in the title. There is nothing more secretive in the way this diary was kept than in any other, and she speculates as much as any other literary diarist on what posterity will make of it: "the heart can still bound a little at the thought that people might one day whisper about me".
In her letters and personality she is boldness itself. Making the running in all her love affairs, she continues to write provocative letters, full of personal allusions, private jokes and romantic reminiscences to the lover of her undergraduate days at Oxford, Henry Harvey, throughout his two marriages.
She never has any luck with her men. They all love but leave her. At the beginning of the war she is working for Censorship in Bristol, and is billeted at a large house, The Coppice, with several families. One of these is in the process of breaking up, and she finds herself having a brief but intense affair with the separated husband of her close friend, Honor. They sit about talking of their entangled lives "like the characters in Uncle Vanya". After endless discussions with Honor of the shortcomings of this disputed husband she decides to get over it all by joining the Wrens, and, uninhibited to the last, actually leaves Honor his letters and her diary concerning the affair.
Sublimating misfortunes and disappointments into her successful novels, she neither despairs of finding true love and marriage, nor loses her sense of humour, making wry Runyonesc references to her spinster state as "this Miss Pym" in her correspondence. With so much call for Courage and Patience she imagines these virtues personified as her two rather dreary stolid little twin daughters.
Witty but never cruel, perceptive and kindly, enjoying everything that comes her way and fighting cancer without selfpity to the end, Miss Pym leaves the world a wearier place without her and every reader must feel, on closing this charming book, that they have lost a friend.
Margaret Lucy