The Comic Art of Barbara Pym

Since Barbara Pym's death in 1980, her popularity has continued to grow among both critics and general readers. Books and articles on her 12 novels and her autobiography are beginning to appear regularly, and she is well on her way to securing a place among the classic English novelists. In 1977, Lord David Cecil called her works ""the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in the last 75 years"". Professor Cooley's study keeps the comic in the foreground. In detailed discussion of each novel, he makes evident her often understated comic effects, demonstrating that even such painful themes as loneliness and death are handled with an emphasis on their comic aspects. Barbara Pym's ironic wit, her ability to transmute unhappiness into laughter, her mild, persistent delight in incongruity, her faith in the healing power of ordinary life, her puncturing of romantic excess - all these combine to put her in the line of great comic writers that includes Moliere and Beckett.