Barbara Pym Quotes
You know Mildred would never do anything wrong or foolish. I reflected a little sadly that this was only too true and hoped I did not appear too much that kind of person to others. Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.
Pym, Barbara. Excellent Women. Jonathan Cape, 1952.
A Bill was being debated to control theaters and plays. At the time in England, playwrights would commonly write dialoge ridiculing politicians of the day. Lord Chesterfield was opposed to the proposed cencorship.
… to escape censure a man must pass his whole life without saying or doing one ill or foolish thing.
This of course applied mostly to public personages and applied not only in the political arena but also in the social arena.
Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was an 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). In 1977 her career was revived when the critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin both nominated her as the most under-rated writer of the century. 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.
