 First edition | |
| Author | Barbara Pym |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Comedy |
| Publisher | Macmillan |
Publication date | 1986 (1st edition) |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (hardbound) |
| Pages | 190 (1st edition) |
An Academic Question is the title given an unfinished novel by Barbara Pym, written in the early 1970s. A reconstructed version was published posthumously in 1986.
Caroline 'Caro' Grimstone is the wife of a sociology lecturer in a small West Country red brick university at the start of the 1970s. While her husband, Dr Alan Grimstone, is fascinated by dinner party discussions of African anthropology and minor academic points, Caro is growing tired of the dull town and her pale marriage and feels unfulfilled by her position as the mother of their 4-year-old daughter Kate. For something to do, she undertakes voluntary work at a nursing home, reading to an elderly and nearly blind retired missionary, the Reverend Mr Stillingfleet. Alan realises that Stillingfleet possesses an unpublished manuscript in their shared field of anthropology. Concerned that the manuscript will be lost – or, worse, bequeathed to a rival – Alan accompanies his wife on one of her visits to read to Stillingfleet and steals the manuscript, which allows him to write a ground-breaking paper that will further his academic ambitions.
Following Stillingfleet's death soon afterwards, Caro begins to regret the theft. She also suspects that Alan is having an affair with an apparently divorced colleague, Iris Horniblow. She seeks the guidance of her friends Kitty Jeffreys, a self-absorbed English woman who has spent much of her adult life in the Caribbean, Kitty's sexually and racially indeterminate son Coco, and Kitty's sister Dolly, a spinster who cares for a large family of hedgehogs in her back garden. Though none of this proves helpful, Alan eventually admits that he has had a fling with Cressida, the assistant editor of the journal that is publishing his article.
Outraged at first, Caro goes to stay with her mother, then with her sister Susan, living in a seedy part of London. While there she goes to see Cressida, intending to have a showdown, but finds her in a state of hopeless disorganisation, "a jolly friendly girl who would go to bed with anyone and think nothing of it". Realising she has made too much of the incident, Caro returns home to the warm welcome of her flustered husband and their marriage resumes its course. She offers to help in the university library, where 'the Stillingfleet collection' of papers has been rehoused in a cupboard. But no sooner has the manuscript which has caused so much chaos been returned clandestinely than it is destroyed in a fire started accidentally by (mildly) protesting students on Guy Fawkes Night. Now Crispin Maynard, Alan's recently retired professor, who has been threatening to consult the papers in order to refute his colleague, can no longer turn the academic question into a field of contention.
The character Coco Jefferys was modelled on Pym's close friend Richard Roberts, a young antiques dealer from the Bahamas whom she had met in 1963, and whose mother Lady Roberts still lived in Nassau but is transported to England as Kitty Jeffreys in the novel. [1]
Pym commenced writing the novel in 1970 and completed the first draft in 1971. Her last novel had been published in 1961 and she had been rejected by publishers since then. At the time, Pym had no expectations for her "academic novel", writing "[p]erhaps my immediate circle of friends will like to read it". She intended the novel to be "a sort of Margaret Drabble effort", [2] but it turned out very different and she was ultimately dissatisfied with it.
Pym left two drafts of An Academic Question, one as a first-person narrative and one in the third person. After Pym's death, her sister Hilary and her literary executor Hazel Holt revised the work for publication from a combination of her notes and the two drafts. [3] The novel was published posthumously in 1986, by Macmillan in England and E. P. Dutton in the United States. There have also been translations in French as Une Question Purement Académique (Julliard, 1990), [4] in German as Die Frau des Professors (The Professor's Wife, Piper, 1991), [5] and in Italian as Una questione accademica (Astoria, 2019). [6]
It was Hazel Holt who chose the title from a phrase in one of the novel's final chapters. [7] Its immediate inspiration was a wrangle in Africa, the academic journal of the International African Institute that Pym was editing at the time of writing. [8]
The novel received mixed reviews, with most acknowledging its status as a draft. Kirkus Reviews called it "minor but still intriguing... on occasion, deliriously funny", [9] though the New York Times called it "one of Pym's paler efforts". [10] However, John Bayley, writing for the London Review of Books , considered it "as readable and characteristic as any in the Pym canon…The spontaneity of the humour is fundamental to this novelist's unique marriage of art and life." [11]
Pym's novels routinely feature characters from her previous works. The characters of Sister Dew from An Unsuitable Attachment and Digby Fox from Less than Angels reappear. But most notably, this novel features the memorial service for Esther Clovis, a character who had appeared in three previous Pym novels, starting with Excellent Women . Here the memorial service is seen from the point of view of Caro, who did not know Miss Clovis and thus is attempting to piece together the woman's personality from the details of her service. The service will be seen a second time, from a different perspective, in the final novel that Pym wrote, A Few Green Leaves . [12]
It has further been noted that Caro and Alan are among the comparatively scarce married central characters in Pym's fiction. The other exceptions are Adam and Cassandra Marsh-Gibbon in Civil to Strangers and Rodney and Wilmet Forsyth in A Glass of Blessings . In addition there are the unmarried Prudence Bates' older friends, Nicholas and Jane Cleveland in Jane and Prudence , in which their difference in status is contrasted. [13]
Kate Saunders, introducing the 2012 reedition of the novel, points out that Pym even includes herself and her sister Hillary in its course: "Two women who had retired from jobs in London came to lunch. They were rather nice spinster sisters…They must have loved in their time, perhaps loved and lost and come through it unscathed", which was how Pym viewed herself at the time. [14]
Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was an English novelist. In the 1950s she published a series of social comedies, of which the best known are Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958). In 1977 her career was revived when the critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin both nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Her novel Quartet in Autumn (1977) was nominated for the Booker Prize that year, and she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Excellent Women, the second published novel by Barbara Pym, first appeared from Jonathan Cape in 1952. A novel of manners, it is generally acclaimed as her funniest and most successful in that genre.
Quartet in Autumn is a novel by British novelist Barbara Pym, first published in 1977. It was highly praised and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the top literary prize in the UK. This was considered a comeback novel for Pym; she had fallen out of favour as styles changed, and her work had been rejected by publishers for 15 years. This followed her successful record as a novelist during the 1950s and early 1960s. As a novel, it represents a departure from her earlier style of light comedy, as it is the story of four office workers on the verge of retirement.
Some Tame Gazelle is Barbara Pym's first novel, originally published in 1950.
No Fond Return of Love is a novel by Barbara Pym, first published in 1961.
(John) Robert Liddell was an English literary critic, biographer, novelist, travel writer and poet.
Hazel Holt was a British novelist.
Less Than Angels is a novel by Barbara Pym, first published in 1955.
A Glass of Blessings is a novel by Barbara Pym, first published in 1958. It deals with the growing estrangement of a well-to-do married couple and the means by which harmony is restored.
Crampton Hodnet is a comic novel by Barbara Pym, published posthumously in 1985, and originally written in 1940.
An Unsuitable Attachment is a novel by Barbara Pym, written in 1963 and published posthumously in 1982.
The Sweet Dove Died is a novel by Barbara Pym, first published in 1978. The title is a quotation from a poem, "I Had a Dove", by John Keats.
Thomas Michael Maschler was a British publisher and writer. From 1960, he was influential as the head of publishing company Jonathan Cape over a period of more than three decades. Maschler was noted for instituting the Booker Prize for British, Irish and Commonwealth literature in 1969. He was involved in publishing the works of many notable authors, including Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller, Gabriel García Márquez, John Lennon, Ian McEwan, Bruce Chatwin and Salman Rushdie.
Jane and Prudence is the third novel by Barbara Pym, first published in 1953.
St Michael and All Angels Church is a Grade II listed Church of England church in Barnes in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. It is located at 39 Elm Bank Gardens, London SW13 0NX.
Civil to Strangers and Other Writings is a collection of novels and short stories by Barbara Pym, published posthumously.
A Few Green Leaves is the final novel by Barbara Pym, first published in 1980, the year of Pym's death. Although several novels were published posthumously, A Few Green Leaves was the final novel she worked on.
A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters is a 1984 publication of writings by the English novelist Barbara Pym. Released after Pym's death, the volume was edited by Pym's sister Hilary and her literary executor Hazel Holt.
A Lot To Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym is a 1990 biography of the English novelist Barbara Pym. The author, Hazel Holt, worked with Pym in the 1950s at the International African Institute in London before embarking on her own literary career. The pair remained friends, and Holt functioned as Pym's literary executor after the latter's death from breast cancer in 1980.
À La Pym: The Barbara Pym Cookery Book is a 1988 cookbook by Hilary Pym and Honor Wyatt collecting recipes for meals served, or mentioned, in the novels of Hilary's sister, Barbara Pym. The book was published in the United States by E.P. Dutton in 1988, and in the United Kingdom by Prospect Books in 1995.
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