An Academic Question

This unusual, previously unpublished novel, from Barbara Pym's "silent" period, is set in a provincial English university in the early 1970s. Despite its unfamiliar setting and atypical plot, more akin to a mystery novel than her usual comedy of manners, it will be immediately recognizable to any Pym aficionado. Pym had set out to write "a sort of Margaret Drabble effort...but of course it hasn't turned out like that at all." The heroine of the book is Caroline Grimstone, the bored young wife of an ambitious anthropologist who feels she ought to do something with her life more useful than chatting about hedgehogs with her eccentric neighbour Dolly or trading fashion advice with her friends Kitty and Coco Jeffreys, an "exquisite" mother-son pair recently fled from their Caribbean estates. She finds a cure for her tedium at a local old-people's home, where she reads to the elderly and becomes a party to her husband's purloining of an important manuscript. This little theft sparks a sequence of rivalries both academic and amorous, and the manuscript itself falls victim to a mini student riot. The text of this "transitional" novel about an unsettled woman in a turbulent society is based upon Barbara Pym's first-person early draft - a version she once rejected as too "cosy," too much like her other novels that publishers had been declining for years. Hazel Holt, Pym's literary executor and longtime editorial associate, prepared the novel for publication by amalgamating the author's original two drafts, and consulting Pym's notes and the original holograph version.