Oswestry and Oxford: Early Writings, Literary Influences, and Some Tame Gazelle

Abstract

Barbara Pym employs a limited range of settings in her novels, based on places she knew in her own life, each of which has a certain value for her. Those places are Oswestry, her childhood home; Oxford; London; and localities abroad with which she was familiar: Germany and, later, Italy. Oxford and London appear as themselves; Oswestry is the model for all the villages and country towns in the fiction; and Germany and Italy, places of rather unreal romance, appear sometimes as themselves, sometimes as Hungary or Finland. Together they make up her imaginative world, the geography of her feelings.