Barbara Pym’s humor, stoicism are a welcome tonic for our times

There’s a passage in Barbara Pym’s “Jane and Prudence” that always makes me smile. After Jane Cleveland’s husband is installed as vicar in a village church, Jane is introduced to a Miss Doggett, a robust woman who bosses around the meeker parishioners.

When Miss Doggett makes an obscure comment about a widower in the village, Jane suggests:

“Men want only one thing?” “Yes,” [replies Miss Doggett]. “We know what it is.”

“Typing a man’s thesis, correcting proofs, putting sheets sides-to-middle, bringing up children, balancing the housekeeping budget . . .”

Jane recites out loud this list of the things men want. She’s a challenging person, because the churning thoughts most of us keep to ourselves she blurts out without thinking. Her daughter is impatient with her, her husband resigned, but she unnerves Miss Doggett.

Throughout the 1953 novel, the question of what men want keeps cropping up. Only Miss Doggett seems to think men’s minds run to sex, the implied “one thing.” However, when she says this, “she looked puzzled; it was as if she had heard that men only wanted one thing, but had forgotten for the moment what it was.”

“Jane and Prudence” is a slight novel, not one of my own favorites in Pym’s oeuvre, but it contains all the elements that keep me revisiting her work. Pym (1913-1980) wrote small books that, like Austen’s works, were set in villages or in London neighborhoods. Pym’s are not courtship stories, though, but tales of the lives of ordinary people doing ordinary things.

Pym, the subject of a new biography, “The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym,” by Paula Byrne, worked for an anthropological journal - and her characters often act like anthropologists, studying the customs of the tribe that they’re both part of and separate from. They probe beneath the surface, often humorously, but with devastating insight into human foibles.

In “Quartet in Autumn” (1977), her most somber novel, she gives us a woman who - like Pym herself - has had a mastectomy. Marcia lives alone and has a painful crush on her surgeon, to the point of trailing him around London, hoping for a glimpse of him. She imagines his life, longs for his attention. Her story is painful and poignant.

At the other end of the behavioral spectrum is the housekeeper for a pair of clergymen in “A Glass of Blessings” (1958). This is a man named Wilf Bason, whose pomposity and stupidity evoke Mr. Collins in “Pride and Prejudice.” Bason steals a Fabergé egg belonging to one of the clergymen he looks after and shows it off in the cereal aisle of a grocery store. He tosses it in the air as the narrator looks on in horror. Recluse, buffoon, Marcia, Bason, Pym encompasses the range of human behavior.

Pym was among a group of British women who wrote domestic novels in the mid-20th century. However, when I read her work, I think less often of Elizabeth Taylor or Elizabeth Bowen. Rather, it is James Joyce and “Ulysses” that come to mind.