SOURCE: "Lem and Pym," in The New Yorker, February 26, 1979, pp. 115-21.

In the following excerpt, Updike comments on Pym's writing career and offers a favorable assessment of Excellent Women and Quartet in Autumn.

Atomic aloneness in a crowded world, where life is cheap and its accidents random, can be better felt in the wanly Christian world of Barbara Pym. This English novelist has had a disheartening career. After publishing six deceptively old-fashioned novels between 1950 and 1961, she was spurned by more than twenty publishers and understandably let her pen languish. From 1946 to 1974, she supported herself as an assistant editor for the quarterly Africa. As retirement approached, however, she began to write again, a novel "as churchy as I wished to make it," and in January of 1977 her name appeared in the Times Literary Supplement as the heroine of a poll taken to determine the most underrated British writer of...