Civil to Strangers [Paperback]

The title story is Pym's second novel, though it was published only posthumously, in 1987. Art is here close to life; the heroine of the title story, Cassandra (developed from Pym's dream-name Sandra at Oxford?) is the submissive, ironic wife to a writer of fiction and poetry, Adam, named from Paradise Lost, another who is much given to reading aloud to his lady, as did Pym's fellow student Henry Harvey to her. The book is recognizably suppositious as to the author's possible marriage to Harvey -- wishful thinking plus self-abnegation and a dose of shrewd realism. Cassandra travels to Budapest, as Pym and her sister did in 1935.

Harvey went to Finland in 1934, lecturing at a university, and married a Finnish girl in 1937; Pym wrote her `Finnish novel', which began as letters to him there and finished in 1938 as `Gervase and Flora'. Set in Helsingfors, this is truly a story of unreciprocated love bravely borne.

When World War II began, Pym remained at her parental home in Oswestry, and worked in a military canteen from 1939-41. During this time she wrote the three war stories: `Home Front novel', `So Very Secret' and `Goodbye Balkan Capital'. These all treat of the early years of the war as experienced in the English countryside, and the involvement of English women.

`Home Front Novel' opens with a First Aid class practising bandaging, goes on to show the arrival in a village of a batch of evacuees and the conversion of gardens to vegetable growing.

`So Very Secret' has another Cassandra heroine, `a country woman in early middle age ... My life is filled up with all the activities of a country village in wartime -- Red Cross and canteen work, besides church brasses and flowers'. We see Cassandra doing her canteen duty before she enjoys an espionage adventure in familiar Oxford, a London hotel, and a train from Paddington to the countryside, with an escape into another Red Cross lecture.

In `Goodbye Balkan capital' Laura, a member of the ARP Casualty Service, proud of her tin hat, listening to the radio news, learns of the dangerous position of a diplomatic body that includes a former university lover of hers, besieged in the Balkans. This derives directly from Pym's recorded hearing that the Belgrade Legation to which Jay belonged was missing (noted in her diary, April 1941).

In 1972 Pym retired to live in Finstock village, Oxfordshire. In `So, some tempestuous morn', early in the decade, she reminiscently shows us a young girl in Oxford pining for unattainable undergraduates, embarking on flirtation. `The Christmas visit', written in 1977, deals with Christmas observances in the English countryside.

`Across a crowded room', written in 1979, records an actual visit to an Oxford College for an anniversary dinner, as her real-life escort there, portrayed as `George', in fact Edwin Ardener, told the Barbara Pym conference in Oxford in 1986.