A glass of blessings, by Barbara Pym

OK everyone; it is time to re-re-discover Barbara Pym!  When my book club chose this book, I was surprised to find only one copy in the MLC, and it one of her best.  A copy or two of each of her other titles can be found scattered about.  And that is too bad.  Her main titles were published in the 1950’s but her 1963 novel was rejected by her long-time publisher and others.  She was devastated.  However, she shot to fame in the 1977 when two noted authors named her as one of the most underrated authors of the century in the Times Literary Supplement.  Her books were all republished and I believe I read all of them at that time.  Luckily she lived to see her work warmly received before her death in 1980.  Now, time has passed her by again.  A master of the quiet parish novel set in mid-century Britain; she truly does merit the comparison to Jane Austen.  In A glass of blessings, we follow Wilmet Forsyth, a thirtyish married woman, through the course of a year or so.  Childless, unemployed, and slightly bored with her civil servant husband (who she met ten years previously as a dashing officer in Italy during World War II) , she toys with the idea of having a mild sort of affair with the brother of a good friend, with that friend’s husband, or perhaps with the handsome new parish priest at St. Luke’s.  She attends St. Luke’s because her local church is insufficiently “high” enough for her tastes.  With gentle humor and a keen eye for human foibles, Pym’s writing struck me again as both very modern and very of Austen’s time.   My cup of tea.  256 pp.