A Glass of Blessings

Deceptively light and entertaining A Glass of Blessings is one of Barbara Pym's best-loved novels. Its gentle humour might suggest that the heroine, Wilmet, is bloodless, the epitome of the English cardiganned spinster. She is that certain kind of literary character that has become a staple of English literature ever since Jane Austen whose heir(ess) these days might be Bridget Jones. There's something apologetic and endearingly failed about them until the epiphany when small shifts in pereception make everything come right. Wilmet in this case is married but childless. You can't imagine her having sex. There's a weird chasteness in this type of heroine making her seem dated even when worldly wise, or in Wilmet's case when she imagines she is wise. Her trajectory is from naive knowingness to a more human recognition that she has in fact missed out on her observations big time. The man she naively imagines having an affair with is gay. Her only friend, frump or not, catches the handsomest man in the book. Her own husband confesses to having dinner with an another woman. That's something else that makes this book seem dated. His ‘betrayal' is of the gentlest most innocent sort, like his wife, more in the mind than in the act. Apart from the pleasure to be got from a period piece like this why read this book? Pleasure is the key. You may not want to use it as a mirror of reality but the enjoyment of her prose, the nuances, the double-edged dialogue are sheer joy to read.

The cleverness of Pym is to allow us to see things through the heroine's blinkered eyes and simultaneously from our own more knowing and privileged point of view as reader. She lets us into the secret of Wilmot without Wilmot knowing. She can also make us care about the early, snobbish and cold-eyed woman who obsesses about the goings on in the clergy house - and gets it all wrong. For all that her world is the commonplace one of the well-heeled middle class where the wives stay at home, filling their time with tea and shopping while the husbands go out to work at their responsible but, we imagine, stultifyingly dull jobs in some ministry or other, we lower our sights from the bigger social picture and begin to care about this small world being laid out before us. There is an absence of money worries except for minor characters and a lack of high drama. It is a world where one small remark can be remembered and may eventually reverberate down the decades to change the course of lives. Ait is a place where small untruths burn the soul and only small things matter. Anne Tyler said Pym reminds us of the heart-breaking silliness of everyday life, an apt description of her own novels too. They are heart-breaking because small things do matter, silly because when set against the great global tragedies of every era they seem negligible but they ring with truth as well because they show life as it is lived when the heat of history being made is turned low.