Reading guide: Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym

Quartet in Autumn follows four ageing colleagues as they approach retirement: Letty, Marcia, Edwin and Norman. They are all clerks of some kind, working in the same unspecified London office. Each of them lives alone – unmarried or widowed – and we read about the everyday intricacies of their worlds outside of work.

Although not explicitly friends, the quartet think of, and depend on, interactions with each other more than with anyone else. Lovingly and poignantly, satirically in the gentlest but sharpest way, Pym guides us through their small lives and the facades they erect to defend themselves against the outside world.

Barbara Pym was born in 1913 and is one of England’s most treasured novelists. Throughout the 1950s, she wrote and published a series of social comedies, renowned for their poignant yet piercing insights into post-war middle-class life. The best known are Excellent Women (1952) and The Glass of Blessings (1958). In these novels, she chronicles the lives of her heroines: women who are often ordinary, a little lonely and socially marginalised.

In the 1960s, when Catch-22 and Ian Fleming were the bestsellers, Pym experienced a 15-year period where she was deemed almost unpublishable, her novels labelled out of date and touch. Pym commented, ‘the so-called Swinging Sixties were starting and I think quite a lot of publishers had the idea that the kind of thing I was writing was neither saleable nor liked by readers’.

In 1977, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil were asked to name their most underrated novelists of the century (for the Times Literary Supplement) and both stated Pym. Shortly after this, Macmillan published Quartet in Autumn which went on to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1977. 

This inspired a renewed interest in Pym’s past and current work. When she died from abdominal cancer in 1980, she had published eight novels, with several more works then published posthumously. Even today, she is regarded as being in a state of ‘forever being forgotten, then forever revived’. Pym has more recently been discovered by admirers of ‘spinster lit’.

Pym always worked a full-time job throughout her writing career, at the International African Institute in London. There is speculation that she worked as a spy, decoding letters during the Second World War. However, in true Pym-and-proper style, she always denied it. 

‘It’s a crackling, funny novel and at one level joyful and natural to adapt – the crisp, fresh, funny dialogue, characters written with graphic clarity, simple but crafted scenes that mostly happen in one location (the office), the perfect specifics of time and place…

At the same time, Quartet is introspective, delicate, melancholic and quiet, with no explosive plotting… When so much of the novel’s rocket fuel is the comedy and poignancy, the tragedy and redemption, that arises in these gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, how to traverse these gaps? It’s easy in a novel, you just say it. In a play you have to be far cleverer, and I’ve learned through multiple redrafts to have huge respect for this form and to disregard a lot of what I thought I knew about writing.’

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Both Letty and Marcia are unmarried women, living alone. Raina Lipsitz called Pym’s rewriting of societal priorities a ‘radical act’. Other critics find that Pym writes that ‘female singleness is temperamental rather than a legal or social status’, which would have stood out at the time of writing. What did you think of Pym’s representation of single life as a retired older woman? Do you think Letty and Marcia’s life choices were bold and radical in the 1970s, and do they seem either of these things today? 

To some, Pym can be seen as Jane Austen without happy endings. The Times commented that ‘every sentence in this novel manages to be simultaneously hilarious and almost unbearably bleak’. What do you think Pym has in common with Austen? Is Quartet in Autumn too unhappy a novel, given the loneliness of our protagonists and their quiet lives? Did you find that the book’s comic moments balance the bleak ones, or is the humour too subtle for today’s readers? 

Letty and Marcia retire on the same day and are told that no one will be replacing them – their jobs are obsolete. What do you think Pym is saying here? What does it reveal about the work the women have dedicated their lives to?

There are instances of racism throughout the novel, and Letty even moves out of her bedsit when a Nigerian landlord and his family move in. What did the protagonists’ prejudices reveal to you about them as characters and about London (and the UK) in the 1970s? Given that she worked at the Institute of Africa for many years, what are your feelings about Pym’s writing here? 

Pym experienced an unpublishable period in the 1960s. She was deemed out-dated, boring and unsellable. Where do you stand on this? Did you find Quartet in Autumn too old-fashioned? Or did you value its nuance and the ways in which it chronicles the everyday life of older people? Do you think readers can relate to it today?

Matthew Schneier in the New York Times notes that, in Pym’s work, ‘women remain nearly invisible to men’. Would you say this is true for Quartet in Autumn? Norman and Edwin think about Marcia and Letty often, but do they see them through a lens of their own vanity? They break into laughter at the thought of visiting the women when they are in need. They resist getting the women ‘mixed up in their consciousness’. The men make mean jokes about the women’s looks and patronise their ‘uses’. Letty and Marcia, on the other hand, seem to view the men very fondly. What did you think of the way Edwin and Norman think about and discuss Letty and Marcia? How do the men’s attitudes compare and contrast with the women’s?

Schneier also states that, ‘to read [Pym] one must have an appetite for endless jumble sales and whist drives, and the interfering wisdom of dowagers and distressed gentlewomen’. She writes about a very particular middle-class. Do you think Quartet in Autumn appeals to a narrow or wide range of readers? Do you think the protagonists have an air of privilege that more working-class readers might feel excluded from, and struggle to empathise with?

On Letty’s first day of retirement, she is excited to wear a suit ‘much too good’ for work and to go to the library to read. This is met with disdain and mockery by her older landlady. Letty asks herself, ‘Why shouldn’t she just read novels and listen to the radio and knit and think about her clothes?’ She has worked for so long and this is now her time. But is it really her time, on her terms? How does Pym explore the ways in which women are watched and judged, and the burden they feel to always be busy?