Paula Byrne's new biography is the first to make full use of Barbara Pym's archive. Diaries, notes, letters, stories and more than a dozen novels - which as Byrne shows more often than not reflected the themes of Pym's own experience: worlds of spinster sisters and academics in unrequited love, of powerful intimacies that pulled together seemingly humble lives. She made a career on the Home Front as a single working girl in London's bedsit land. She spent time in Nazi Germany, falling for a man who was close to Hitler. She attended Oxford in the thirties when women were the minority. But who was Barbara Pym and why was the life of this English writer - one of the greatest chroniclers of the human heart - so defined by rejection, both in her writing and in love? Picked as a Book to Look Forward to in 2021 by the Guardian, The Times and the Observerīook Synopsis 'Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously' JILLY COOPERīarbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of the late twentieth century, revealing the inner workings of domestic life so brilliantly that her friend Philip Larkin announced her the era's own Jane Austen. She later used his copious love letters for blackmail.This authoritative and engaging book presents a fascinating portrait of a woman who was variously darling of the London stage, a poet whose work was admired by Coleridge and a mistress to the most powerful men in England, and yet whose fortunes were nevertheless precarious, always on the brink of being squandered through recklessness, excess and passion.About the Book 'Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously' JILLY COOPER His dissipated lifestyle landed the couple and their baby in debtors' prison, where Mary wrote her first book of poetry and met lifelong friend Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire.On her release, Mary quickly became one of the most popular actresses of the day, famously playing Perdita in 'The Winter's Tale' for a rapt audience that included the Prince of Wales, who fell madly in love with her. After being raised by a middle-class father, Mary was married, at age fourteen, to Thomas Robinson. Sex, fame and scandal in the theatrical, literary and social circles of late 18th-century England.One of the most flamboyant women of the late-eighteenth century, Mary Robinson's life was marked by reversals of fortune.

Perdita by Paula Byrne