Barbara Mary Crampton Pym:
(2 June 1913 – 11 January 1980).
English novelist. In the 1950s, she published a series of social comedies, of which the best known are Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958). After a period of rejection by publishers, her career was revived in 1977 when the critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin nominated her as the most underrated writer of the previous 75 years. Her novel Quartet in Autumn (1977) was nominated for the Booker Prize that year, and she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
It was a cold November day and she had dressed herself up in layers of cardigans and covered the whole lot with her old tweed coat, the one she might have used for feeding the chickens in.
