Jane and Prudence

By

Barbara Pym

The Barbara Pym Society of North America will focus their meeting this year in March (2012) on Jane and Prudence.  If you can make it, sign up and I’d love to meet you at Harvard, Cambridge, MA.

The one thing I know about this work and all of Ms Pym’s work is that I’ve missed bucket loads of information.  Books such as this one and all that I’ve read so far of Ms Pym cry out for group readings.  Women need to gather round and well-rounded men, who love women, need to pick up these books.

A clergyman’s wife who worries about match making and not necessarily about her husband’s parish.  A very independent friend and a grown daughter who moves in and out of the story, very much more apt than her mother.

And then of course the men.

I enjoy Ms Pym because of her ability to create believable men.  Some tired, some scoundrels, some wonderfully placid and loving (such as Jane’s husband) yet devoted to his calling. 

But of course it is the women, their relationship with each other where Ms Pym shines.  Women know and ought to acknowledge that there is no one more hard on a woman than – well another woman. 

“They had thought to creep round the back and peer in at the windows to surprise her in the kitchen, perhaps catch her in the very act of stubbing out a cigarette in the tea leaves in the sink basket.  She felt almost triumphant that they should have failed.”

“She had been feeling that things were pretty desperate if one found oneself talking about and almost quoting Matthew Arnold to comparative strangers, though anything was better than having to pretend you had winter and summer curtains when you had just curtains.”

Yes, that’s the genius of Barbara Pym the mundane, the simple social hiccups we feel, cringe over and now have to stop and laugh over because it’s true – why bother?

And so the story continues.  Love affairs maneuvered by well-intended women who make lives miserable for more well-intended women – and in the end and what I love about Jane and Prudence – it’s the women who stay loyal to one another and the men who stay at arm’s length; not a poor relationship with the women they love but a different  - a sort of outsiders’ respect.

“‘It seems sometimes that we must hurt people we love,’ said Fabian, stroking her hair. ‘Oscar Wilde said, didn’t he…?’

Let’s not bother about him,’ said Jessie.  ‘I always think he must have been such a bore, saying those witty things all the time.  Just imagine seeing him open his mouth to speak and then waiting for it to come out.  I couldn’t have endured it.’”