Pym as Austen?

[MsAmerica]

I've never gotten around to reading Barbara Pym, but this intrigued me, from a review:

An Excellent Woman? Most of the Time.
Paula Byrne’s biography of the novelist Barbara Pym reveals the complicated person behind the vicars and the jumble sales.

Her six early novels, charming, small-scale comedies of domestic manners published between 1950 and 1961, had always found readers, and drawn admiring comparisons to Jane Austen.
www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/books/review/paula-byrne-the-adventures-of-miss-barbara-pym.html

I remember when someone told me that Anne Bronte was very similar to Austen, which proved totally untrue. I suspect there has never been anyone like Austen. But I"m curious about opinions here.

Meanwhile, for Pym fans:

When Barbara Pym Couldn’t Get Published
The English novelist was coming into her prime when publishers decided that she was outdated. But some of her contemporaries knew better.
By Thomas Mallon
The novels’ humor is so sly that a reader sometimes gets halfway into a new sentence before starting to laugh at the one before.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/when-barbara-pym-couldnt-get-published

She was a brilliant writer. Funny and observant. Read some of her work and then the biography if you’re up for that . It gives a really interesting context to her writing - she was ahead of her time .

Okay, but is it reasonable to say she's like Austen?

I don’t think she’s even a bit like Jane Austen, but I also don’t think that “charming, small-scale comedies of domestic manners” really gets to the heart of what either of them wrote.

I think the comparison to Austen is probably a bit lazy and sexist but there’s something in it. Both were sharp witted women who wrote, often very humorously, about women and the different social roles available to them in their respective times. The church and clergy are often involved. Both are interested particularly in what life is like for single women, though for Austen that’s clearly (and unsurprisingly) a source of great anxiety whilst for Pym it’s often a position that turns out to be desirable. Both are very shrewd observers of people and manners, but (and again, a lot of this is largely representative of how novels and narratives changed in the intervening 150ish years) Austen tends a little more toward caricature whilst Pym’s women especially are (I think) pretty fully fleshed out and individualised. Austen’s novels are, properly speaking, comedies, in that they conclude with marriages and a lot of people love them specifically as love stories. Pym’s novels aren’t so straightforward in terms of genre and often reject marriage or at least complicate the idea that marriage is the only desirable conclusion for a novel (or woman).
The reason I say it’s a lazy and sexist comparison is that I don’t think anyone would compare equivalent male writers from widely differing periods like this. But that’s partly because there are absolutely tons of very well known male writers so blurb writers can/could afford to be more specific and fine grained in their comparisons. That’s changing now, of course, as more and more women writers gain prominence but I think when Pym was mostly publishing it was a real issue.

ps no, Anne Brontë isn’t much like Austen, I agree, though I can see it more for Agnes Grey than Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I was also told Trollope (A, not J) was like Austen which again is superficially sort of true in that there are clergymen and weddings in both but that’s a pretty reductive way of thinking about either author.

Yes, I'd take that as a belittling insult to Austen!

Yes I do... but less romantic and more fun

I understand why they say Austen and Pym are similar but they aren't really. They both write about women's lives, Pym i find more serious than Austen.

I would highly recommend Excellent women though, it's one of those books I tend to turn to each year for a re read

It was a comment like this, I think by Cecil Day Lewis, that led to BP being rediscovered about 30 years ago and her novels being brought back into print.
Yes, similar in that both concentrated on a small sphere of action, were understated but sharp in their observations, concentrated on lives of women limited by circumstances.
It's not a competition though.

I'm late to this conversation, but @Confuciusornis wow, what astute observations. Couldn't agree more