Quartet in Autumn

Quartet in Autumn is one of Barbara Pym's later novels, a bit more sober than her earlier ones. The novel revolves around four colleagues who are all close to retirement age and single.

Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia are all more or less alone. The novel explores their relationships with each other and with others. It's awkward and sad. They are each fairly strange.

This is only the second of Pym's novels that I've read (after Excellent Women), but each time I'm reading Pym, I have the urge to read her into one of the characters. She reminds me here of Letty, of whom she writes: "She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realise that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction." Of course, in this novel, Pym attempts to write about precisely that sort of life. Pym writes un-nostalgically; she doesn't try to romanticize the single aging woman. Rather, she sarcastically and ironically writes it in all of it's happiness and unhappiness.

The whole novel I spent waiting for something to happen. Things do happen: there's death and insanity, but mostly there's life--often ordinary and simple and boring life. The lesson that Pym presents at the end is the constant existence of the possibility for change. This is a real lesson for the aging quartet--surprises happen and one can make unexpected choices.


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