Abstract

“It was her first weekend in the village, and she had been planning to observe the inhabitants in the time-honoured manner from behind the shadow of her curtains.” On the first page of A Few Green Leaves, Barbara Pym announces the significance of invisibility. This theme, specifically women’s invisibility, reverberates not only throughout this novel, but also in Pym’s other novels, and in Pym’s own biography. As we witness Pym’s women routinely underestimated and ignored, we might initially suppose she is lodging a protest against such disregard of women, particularly women past the first bloom of youth. But Pym’s position is more complicated: women’s invisibility is unjust and insulting, yes, but it is also the precondition of Pym’s marvelous work as an observer, from behind the shadow of her own curtains. She, no less than her characters, makes a virtue of necessity, exploiting invisibility to study others more closely than they know. In A Few Green Leaves, we find excellent examples of invisibility in the characters Emma Howick and Daphne Dagnall. Pym not only makes these women visible, but also shows us how to find the humor and dignity in their situations and how we might make the best of our own invisibility.