“It sometimes seems,” wrote Laura Miller in a piece for Salon.com, published in March 2013 to honor novelist Barbara Pym’s centenary, “there are two schools of enjoyable fiction. In one, the fate of the world hangs in the balance: There’s running and shooting on the low-brow end of this spectrum, and scheming and intrigue higher up. In the other school, the stakes are low — in fact, that’s a key to its appeal. Making this latter sort of fiction work is infinitely more difficult, but the author who pulls it off, especially if he or she is funny, can command a fearsomely loyal readership. Barbara Pym is one of those authors.”

It is no surprise to find that Pym’s Quartet in Autumn is a quiet novel about four aging people whose sole connection with each other is that they work in the same office. It was written towards the end of her life, when she was making a transition from working at The International African Institute to early retirement, living in a bed-sit in Balcombe Street in London during the week, and going to the cottage her sister had bought for them in Oxfordshire during the weekends.

In a letter to the poet Philip Larkin, dated 16 October 1973, Pym writes: 

I am writing, quietly in bed in the early morning, a novel about four people in their sixties working in the same office. I don’t know if I shall finish it or if I do whether it will be any good to try a publisher.

Pym had been a moderately successful novelist but never made enough to live on, and so she had a day job as assistant editor for the journal Africa. By the time Pym started Quartet in 1972, she had given up hope of her work ever being published, as her publisher Jonathan Cape had abandoned her nine years before, in 1963. 

It was an awful and humiliating sensation to be totally rejected after all those years, and I didn’t know what to do about it...Then, when I was on the verge of retiring from my job at the African Institute, the idea for my last novel, Quartet in Autumn, came to me...During the course of the story, the women retire and one of them dies. I wanted to write about the problems and difficulties of this stage in one’s life and also to show its comedy and irony—in fact I’d rather put it the other way round: my main concern was with the comedy and irony, the problems and difficulties having been dealt with almost excessively, one might say, elsewhere...I enjoyed the writing of it almost more than any of the others, perhaps because I felt that I was writing for my own pleasure with no certain hope of publication at that time.

Many strands came together to weave Quartet in Autumn. Not only did Pym draw upon her own experiences of office life and of retiring herself, she was probably also influenced by Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, published in 1923, about a quartet of women who rent a house in Italy for a month. The theme of the novel came to her in a jotting she made in her diary on 19 June 1972: “The position of the unmarried woman--unless, of course, she is somebody’s mistress, is of no interest whatsoever to the readers of modern fiction.” This observation appears near the beginning of Quartet, now filtered through Letty’s point of view:

Of the four only Letty used the library for her own pleasure and possible edification. She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, aging woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.

But Pym is an ironist and in Quartet she disproves this contention, showing instead how much well-observed details, the “triviality” of life as some of her more uncharitable critics put it,  can enrich a story that is seemingly about four boring old people.  We are told early on that Letty is “fluffy and faded, a Home Counties type, still making an effort with her clothes.” In 14 words, Pym has delineated Letty’s character so exactly that I can even hear the way she speaks. 

Later on, we learn that Letty lives in a bed-sit:  “In her comfortable bedsitting room, which had a washbasin behind a screen and a small electric cooker, she prepared a meal of rice with the remains of a chicken.” Again, Pym modulates the emotional pitch of this passage with details, the washbasin behind the screen, the small electric cooker, the remains of a chicken. These three details paint a bleak picture that point up the irony of the word “comfortable” used at the beginning of the sentence. Pym continues:  “It was a comfortable enough life, if a little sterile, perhaps even deprived. But deprivation implied once having had something to be deprived of, like Marcia’s breast, to give a practical example, and Letty had never really had anything much.” Pym’s repetition of the word “comfortable” (like the use of the word “honorable” in Mark Anthony’s speech in Shakepeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra) succeeds in confirming that it is a suspect word, especially as she then goes on to talk about how this kind of “comfortable” life is sterile and deprived. And then we hear Letty musing about how she isn’t really deprived, because she hasn’t had anything to be deprived of, like Marcia’s breast (which was lost to a mastectomy). Then Pym sneaks up on the reader to deliver the emotional whammy: “Letty had never really had anything much.”

Her confidence shaken by repeated rejection of her works for 14 long years, Pym sometimes saw her obsession with details as a problem. “I’ve always liked detail—in fact my love of triviality has been criticised—so perhaps that was something I developed early.” 

“Lunch at the Royal Commonwealth Society with Bob,” she jotted in her diary on 31 July 1969. “In the restaurant all those clergymen helping themselves from the cold table, it seems endlessly. But you mustn’t notice things like that if you’re going to be a novelist in 1968-9 and the 70s. The posters on Oxford Circus Station advertising Confidential Pregnancy Test would be more suitable.”

“What is wrong with being obsessed with trivia?” wrote Pym on 9 November 1970. “Some have criticized The Sweet Dove for this. What are the minds of my critics filled with? What nobler and more worthwhile things?”

Indeed. And people who appreciate Pym’s novel agree. When her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle came out, Antonia White in The New Statesman wrote that Pym worked “in petit point [making] each stitch with perfect precision.” When her second novel, Excellent Women was published, The Church Times made the first flattering comparison with Jane Austen. Later on, in his review of Excellent Women, Alexander McCall Smith wrote: “Like Jane Austen, Pym painted her pictures on a small square of ivory, and covered much the same territory as did her better-known predecessor.”

It is the tiny things of life that make her novels beloved, perhaps because many of us live small lives with small joys and triumphs. But small does not equal mean. What also ensures  her novels a permanent place in the affections of many is that she writes with great empathy and compassion about a group of people - aging women - that society tends to forget. In Quartet, Letty and Marcia, two women on the verge of retirement, are described as follows: 

Each would be given a small golden handshake, but the state would provide for their basic needs which could not be all that great. Elderly women did not need much to eat, warmth was more necessary than food, and people like Letty and Marcia probably had either private means or savings, a nest-egg in the post office or a building society.

By now, the reader knows that this is not true . Letty lives in a bedsit and has “never really had anything much.” Marcia lives alone in a dilapidated house. The emotional pitch of the narrator of this passage is that of the detached bureaucrat who is justifying the meanness of the company’s retirement gift, by claiming on the one hand that elderly women do not need much, and on the other hand that women like Letty and Marcia are well-provided for. The bureaucrat has not the least interest in checking to see if his assumptions are true , and as his assumptions are false, this kind of smug dismissal of these two elderly women makes the passage chilling. 

As the novel is titled Quartet in Autumn, and as it concerns four protagonists, it is no surprise that this novel, right from the beginning, shifts between four points of view: 

That day the four of them went to the library, though at different times. The library assistant, if he had noticed them at all, would have seen them as people who belonged together in some way. They each in turn noticed him; with his shoulder-length golden hair. Their disparaging comments...were no doubt reflections on the shortcomings of their own hair. Edwin wore his...in a sort of bob...and the style was an easy one which Edwin considered not unbecoming to a man in his early sixties. Norman...had always had ‘difficult’ hair, coarse, bristly and now iron grey, which in his younger days had refused to lie down flat...Letty had faded light brown hair...Letty knew that there were white hairs interspersed with the brown and that most people would have had a brightening ‘rinse’ anyway. Marcia’s short, stiff, lifeless hair was uncompromisingly dyed a harsh dark brown from a bottle in the bathroom cupboard...

What a wonderful way of characterizing four people by using details of their hair, and how effortlessly Pym makes the transition from the narrator’s description of the library assistant’s shoulder-length hair, to Edwin’s opinion that his “bob” was “not unbecoming to a man in his early sixties”, to Norman’s frustration with his own ‘difficult’ hair, to Letty’s gentle acceptance of her own white hairs (and her refusal to do anything about them), to Marcia’s fierce desire to have her hair look the way it had thirty years ago. As usual, in a few deft strokes, Pym has rendered each character and made them vivid to us, and moreover she has done it by shifting viewpoints seamlessly. I think that the reason she is able to do this is because she has hit upon the technique of using association as a means of making these transitions.

The term “association” is used in Psychology and Cognitive Science to refer to a connection between ideas or mental states that results from the similarity between those states, or their proximity in space or time. Simple examples included pairs of opposites like “black vs. white”, “hot vs. cold” “fat vs. thin”. Although controversial, the current thinking in cognitive science is that association is the way in which the mind both learns new concepts, and manages information. For example, semantic memory is defined as a “vast network of associations and concepts that underlies our general knowledge of the world.”

The beginning of Pym’s novel uses hair both as a means of delineating the four characters, and as a common denominator that allows her to make these seamless transitions between the viewpoints of the four main characters, because we, the readers of her novel, are not distracted or confused by extraneous or new information. What is so masterful is how we have the four protagonists focusing on the librarian, and then via the hair, delineating the personalities of Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia. The viewpoints both form a unit, and are individual, they are dependent and independent. 

Pym uses this technique throughout her novel. Three wonderful examples occur towards the end, when Marcia lies dying in hospital:

Brian...said something in medical jargon but apparently Mr Strong was not satisfied because he turned to one of the other doctors...They were having quite a discussion about her.

“You’re talking about me,” she said, almost in a whisper.

“Yes--you’re certainly the centre of attraction today.” But Mr Strong said it so nicely, not in a nasty, sarcastic way, as Norman might have done. 

“If they said “No Visitors” then we can’t very well barge in,” Norman pointed out, as he and Edwin sat in the office finishing their lunch...

Pym uses Norman’s name to make a transition between Marcia’s disparaging comparison of what Norman would say to what Norman actually does say in his point of view to Edwin as they eat lunch: “not in a nasty sarcastic way as Norman might have done” and “Norman pointed out, as he and Edwin sat in the office finishing their lunch.” (Pym shows great empathy with Marcia by putting the scene in the hospital from her point of view, as she lies dying in bed. Notice how the detail of the way in which Marcia is barely heard from the bed adds poignancy to the scene, without being overly sentimental.)

She uses the phrase “No Visitors” to make a transition between Norman’s viewpoint of himself and Edwin eating their lunch, and Letty’s viewpoint when she talks to Mrs. Pope:

“If they said “No Visitors” then we can’t very well barge in,” Norman pointed out, as he and Edwin sat in the office finishing their lunch...

“No visitors? Has she just had an operation, then?” Mrs Pope wanted to know.

“I don’t think so. Just what Sister said, I gather,” said Letty.

“Well we know what that means. You mark my words...

Since Pym can’t use proximity as she did in the first case, where both occurrences of the name “Norman” are separated by only a few words, she makes the transition by putting the phrase “No Visitors” in the same place, in the first sentence of each paragraph to create structural similarity: “If they said “No Visitors” then we can’t very well barge in” and “No visitors? Has she just had an operation then?”

Pym continues the conversation between Letty and Mrs. Pope:

“I must think of something to send her...Perhaps a book...”

“A book? Mrs Pope’s tone rang out scornfully...

“If she’s as bad as I think she is,” Mrs Pope went on, “she won’t notice whether you sent her anything or not. And you are a pensioner -- don’t forget that.”

“All the same, I do feel I’d like to send her something,” Letty said, irritated by Mrs Pope’s attitude. “After all, we did work together all those years.”...

“I thought it was only two or three years,” said Mrs Pope. “Not a long time.”

“Yes, but it was an important stage in our lives,” said Letty, deciding definitely on lavender water. 

Lavender. Mr Strong detected the scent of it above the hospital smells. It reminded him of his grandmother...

Lastly, the conversation between Letty and Mrs Pope ends with Letty “deciding definitely on lavender water.” There is a line break, then Pym picks up with the word “Lavender,” again using the proximity on the page to make yet another seamless transition, this time between Letty’s viewpoint and that of Mr Strong.  

By her thematic use of point of view, Pym brilliantly demonstrates her mastery over the material. We have four protagonists, each with a personality and a point of view, and Pym rotates the point of view among these characters as the novel moves forward, so that the reader becomes acquainted with each individual, both inside, from their own point of view, and outside, from other’s points of view.  

Quartet in Autumn helped to launch the rediscovery of Barbara Pym in 1977. After 16 years in the wilderness when no-one would publish her work, Quartet was published by Macmillan and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Tragically, Barbara Pym lived only three years more to enjoy her fame, before dying of cancer in 1980. Since her death, interest has grown in her life and work to such an extent that her name has become an expression: 

To say that a moment is "very Barbara Pym" is to say that it is a self-observed, poignant acceptance of the modesty of one's circumstances, of one's peripheral position. Such a moment also occurs when one realises that for those whom one is observing, one will never be an object of love. Tolerant affection, perhaps, but never deep, passionate love. Indeed, one is not really entitled to expect such an emotion, although it is ennobling, some say, to observe it in others.