A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

First published: 1958

Type of work: Comic realism

Time of work: The mid-1950’s

Locale: London and its environs

Principal Characters:

• Wilmet Forsyth, the protagonist and narrator, a beautiful and aimless woman in her thirties
• Rodney Forsyth, her husband, a civil servant
• Sibyl Forsyth, Rodney s mother, a prosperous widow
• Arnold Root, a professor, Sibyl’s regular companion
• Mary Beamlsh, an unmarried contemporary of Wilmet
• Marlus Ransome, a handsome clergyman
• Rowena Talbott, Wilmet s best friend
• Harry Talbott, Rowena s husband, a thriving businessman
• Piers Longridge, Rowena s ne er-do-well brother

The Novel

A Glass of Blessings begins and ends in one place, at the Anglo-Catholic church of St. Luke in the select West London neighborhood called Holland Park. As the novel opens on the feast day of St. Luke, Wilmet Forsyth notices her old acquaintance Piers Longridge at the church she has recently started attending. The story ends approximately a year later. Wilmet, now firmly established in the “charmed circle” of regular members, comes back with her fellow parishioners from seeing Father Marius Ransome instated as a suburban vicar and turns her thoughts and steps toward her husband, Rodney, in their new flat.

The time between these two events is a period of change and growth for Wilmet. As she is first seen, Wilmet is a privileged but idle woman. Beautiful, elegant, and perceptive, she is married to a good and successful man some years her senior. They have no children and live stylishly with his widowed mother. Apart from her war years in Italy, where she met Rodney, Wilmet has never done anything, largely because she has never needed to do anything. Now, after years of comfort, she has grown restive. Feeling the need to exert herself, Wilmet half deliberately and half accidentally enters into new experiences.

First is her growing involvement with the Church, that arena of choice for so many Pym heroines. Initially reserved, Wilmet gradually makes the acquaintance of the parishioners and their three clergymen: the epicurean rector amusingly named Father Thames, the more priestly if less courtly Father Bode, and Father Marius Ransome, a handsome newcomer in whom Wilmet takes a romantic interest which she vaguely sees as altruistic.

Besides taking Wilmet beyond the sphere of her household (both Rodney and Sibyl are agnostics), this connection with St. Luke’s strengthens her ties with a long-standing acquaintance, Mary Beamish. Miss Beamish, earnest, dowdy, unselfishly devoted to good works, and shackled to a demanding elderly mother, is both a foil and a reproach to Wilmet, who largely because of this contrast holds her in mild dislike. Yet church events, the quartering of Marius Ransome in the Beamishes’ flat, and old Mrs. Beamish’s death, draw the two women together. Wilmet becomes something of a confidante to Mary. She chooses a dress for her unsophisticated friend and sympathizes as Mary, rich and bereaved, seeks a new focus for her unselfish energy—first as a novice in a convent, then as housekeeper in a retreat house, finally as wife and chief parish helper to Marius Ransome. The reader sees this match coming from far off (the Christian names and the verb “marry” absurdly underline the outcome), but Wilmet, self-deluded, seriously misreads the evidence, just as she fails for a long time to understand how deep and rewarding her friendship with Mary has become.

Wilmet is equally inaccurate in understanding the depth of her relationship to Rowena Talbott, her husband, Harry, and her brother Piers. Rowena may be Wilmet’s “best friend,” but their intercourse appears to be superficial. What truly interests Wilmet for much of the story is the admiration offered by Harry, “love” she will not accept but cannot bring herself to discourage. Yet more romantic potential seems to inhere in Wilmet’s growing, if episodic, friendship with Piers, a night-school instructor in Portuguese and an editorial proofreader. Occasional strolls, lunches, and phone calls encourage Wi]met, who does not have the luxury of worrying over reliable Rodney, to fret about Piers’s disorderly life: his drunkenness, his moodiness, and his unprofessional behavior. Wilmet fancies “improving” Piers and cherishes the illusion that she has indeed reformed him, until an invitation to tea at his flat discloses the truth, that a different love, a handsome if “common” young man called Keith, has made the difference in Piers’s life.

When Marius, Harry, and Piers are no longer romantic possibilities, Wilmet is thrown back on her old life with Rodney— but with a difference. Yet another marriage takes place. Sibyl and Professor Root join hands. Again the reader sees the event coming through a sequence of clues that Wilmet ignores. Once Sibyl marries, Wilmet and Rodney must leave their comfortable groove. Literally, they must find new lodgings; emotionally, they must learn to rely on each other’s companionship, for throughout the novel both have seemed, if in different ways, closer to Sibyl than to each other.

The Characters

A Glass of Blessings is, along with Excellent Women (1952), the only first person narrative among the novels Barbara Pym published during her lifetime. Like the earlier book, it focuses on the one character rather than on a group or community, though to be sure a wide range of characters is seen and judged through Wilmet’s eyes.

If A Glass of Blessings departs from Pym’s prevailing narrative convention, so Wilmet Forsyth is unusual among Pym heroines. First, she is a married woman, though marriage for Wilmet is a comfortable confinement, an arrangement that permits her worst qualities, idleness and self-indulgence, to flourish. Wilmet is similarly handicapped by two other positive gifts of fortune, beauty and taste, that Pym seldom grants in abundance to her heroines. In Pym’s novels, such women as Wilmet, Leonora Eyre in The Sweet Dove Died (1978), and Prudence Bates of Jane and Prudence (1953) consider their beauty sufficient in and of itself to gain for them the romantic regard of men. Miss Bates makes an incidental appearance in A Glass of Blessings as the passively attractive “other woman” whom Rodney takes to dinner, if not to bed. Wilmet, in much the same manner, considers the admiration of men nothing less than her due. The novel’s sequence of events teaches her two important points: that men can love less lovely women (or, in Piers’s case, other men) and that feminine friendship and the solid affinities of marriage are more important to her life than is the romance she wants to receive from Piers, Harry, and Marius.

Though Wilmet is a clearly imperfect character, readers are not inclined to dismiss or dislike her, for she is a touching mixture of self-knowledge and self-deception, a sometimes shrewd and sometimes blind student of human behavior, and a highly imaginative observer of life’s small and great spectacles. Deft at seeing what people are like, Wilmet is less successful at understanding how they feel about one another. The discerning reader therefore accepts much of what Wilmet has to say about traits of character but resists some of the conclusions she draws about those qualities.

The characters surrounding Wilmet are at once schematic and credible. Pym succeeds in giving even the most minor bit players, such as Miss Limpsett, the contentious proofreader of Greek at the publishing house where Piers works, at least a suggestion of roundness. Yet all the lesser characters exist to be compared and contrasted with Wilmet and with one another. For example, of the three chief men in this phase of Wilmet’s life, Rodney, Harry, and Piers, Rodney and Harry resemble each other in being successful and independent bourgeois men, stouter and less dashing than when Wilmet first encountered them in Italy. Yet while Harry pays Wilmet the court she demands, though it is homage of a heavy-handed and ultimately unacceptable sort, Rodney takes her for granted, as she does him. Piers, only a few years junior to Rodney and Harry, has remained more boyish in looks, in worldly situation, and in attitude. He attracts Wilmet because, like Harry, he admires her (in a purely aesthetic way, it turns out) and because, unlike Rodney, he “needs” her (or so she thinks until she discovers the true nature of his needs). Wilmet’s three principal female friends also balance one another. Rowena, beautiful like Wilmet, is unlike her in being fully and busily involved in domestic life: house, husband, children, community. Mary, though dowdy, self-denying, and “splendid” in the way of good works, shares Wilmet’s religious interests—and her tastes in poetry, a sign of true affinity in the Pym world. Sibyl may be a bluff and unadorned old woman, a freethinker, do-gooder, and intellectual, but she nevertheless believes much as Wilmet does on many matters, her empathy being most clearly revealed in the fond but patronizing way that both women treat Rodney.

Critical Context

The novels Pym published through the 1950’s up until the start of the 1960’s achieved sound if unspectacular critical, popular, and financial success. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, they fell into neglect until mention by Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin in The Times Literary Supplement’s list of “most under-rated writers of the century” brought about a Pym revival to which the author herself contributed by returning to fiction-writing after years of silence.

The critical fortunes of A Glass of Blessings have risen along with those of Pym’s work as a whole. As noted above, it was exceptional for Pym to employ first-person narration (indeed, early drafts of A Glass of Blessings were written in the third-person). Critical discussion of the novel has focused on the narrator and central character, Wilmet Forsyth; Robert Emmet Long, for example, who regards A Glass of Blessings as “the most psychologically elegant of Pym’s novels,” describes Wilmet as “the most stylish of her heroines.”

Bibliography

Benet, Diana. Something to Love: Barbara Pym’s Novels, 1986.

Long, Robert Emmet. Barbara Pym, 1986.

Nardin, Jane. Barbara Pym, 1985.

Pym, Barbara. A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters, 1984.