SOURCE: "Quartet in Autumn: New Light on Barbara Pym as a Modernist," in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 24-37.

In the following essay, Stetz challenges conventional comparisons between Pym and Jane Austen, noting modernist themes in Quartet in Autumn that bear resemblance to the writing of Virginia Woolf instead.

Clichés about novelists and their art are like bloodstains; once they have been allowed to stand, they are almost impossible to eradicate. Among the most common and persistent errors in criticism today is the assertion that Barbara Pym's books are "just like" Jane Austen's. Critics point to their shared interest in comedy of manners, their wit, and most of all their style, implying that Pym makes little or no use of literary techniques devised since Austen's time. In fact, as an examination of one of her late novels, Quartet in Autumn (1977), shows, her narrative devices owe more...