A review by sarahmatthews
A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

funny reflective medium-paced

A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

Read on audio

Narrator: Mary Sarah for Listening Books

Pub. 1958, 234pp

___

Wilmet Forsyth is a rather disappointed woman, though she lives very comfortably with her husband Rodney and likeable mother-in-law Sybil and also spends time with her friends Mary and Rowena. Rodney, who works for the Ministry, doesn’t approve of wives working so she spends her days trying to find ‘good works’ to do in her local parish, though she doesn’t seem too successful. She attends church and is well known and liked by the various clergymen who she finds amusing and fascinating.

The assortment of characters in this delightful novel are typically Pymian in their quirky ways and, as the story is told from Wilmet’s perspective, we hear her witty and often cattish observations which made me laugh out loud! Here she is giving blood for the first time, where she encounters a demanding woman with a rare blood type:

“‘This precious blood’ she murmured, and began muttering to herself, first about her blood and then about irrelevant things that I could only half hear - a quarrel with someone about a broken milk bottle and what they had said to each other, it seemed like a ‘stream of consciousness’ novel…Virginia Woolf might have brought something away from the experience, I thought; perhaps writers always do this, from situations that merely shock and embarrass ordinary people. And after all, Miss Daunt was probably only a little odd, nevertheless, I was glad when I was lying down in another room, drinking rather too sweet tea.”

Wilmet’s husband, who she met while serving as a Wren in Italy during the war, isn’t the most attentive and they don’t appear to have a huge amount in common so when both Rowena’s husband Harry and brother Piers separately invite her to lunches and long walks she indulges in their attention and finds herself a bit carried away. She imagines their romantic feelings towards her, but in no way intends to do anything more disloyal than mild flirtation. The scene where she and Piers stroll by the river and contemplate the furniture repository they pass is so well written and an unlikely highlight but I always remember it. There’s a lightly comedic feel to the book overall, though Wilmet does examine her own shortcomings including her self absorbed and judgemental nature, and we see her grow in subtle ways throughout the book.

This was a reread for me and I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting Pym’s world which is always more progressive than you might imagine for a novel centred around church life; here we find a gay relationship heavily hinted at well before it was legalised. I enjoy spotting characters from Pym’s previous novels mentioned in passing; Rocky Napier, Julian Mallory and Prudence Bates all appear.

Oh, and Wilmet’s unusual name was taken from one of Charlotte M. Yonge’s novels which her mother had adored. Interestingly, I’ve just read The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene which includes quotes from one of her novels, The Little Duke, at the start of each chapter, a nice coincidence.