It would be easy to assume from Barbara Pym’s Austenesque novels – with their “unmarried sisters, curates and Sunday lunches at the vicarage” – that the woman who wrote them led a “quiet, uneventful life”, said Ysenda Maxtone Graham in The Times. Not so, as Paula Byrne shows in this “engrossing biography”: Pym’s life was actually rather strange. The “fun begins” in 1931, the year she went up to Oxford, said Lucy Atkins in The Sunday Times. There, she adopted a “risqué alter ego” called Sandra, and “discovered sex” with a handsome fellow student. Upon graduating in 1934, Pym visited Germany and fell in love with an SS officer, with whom she became so “wildly smitten” that she bleached her hair and sported a swastika brooch. Byrne puts this down to “stubborn romanticism” – not real enthusiasm for the Nazi cause – and when war broke out, she “woke up to her appalling error of judgement”.
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