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PARTISAN REVIEW
bring to the world, yet treats their lackluster good nature no more
kindly than does the world. Many of her heroines are as polite, well–
meaning and earnest as Paddington Bear; their element is inno–
cence, and their natural environment a schoolgirl's world of crushes
and mild-mannered schemes, lessons and secret treats. They are still
guileless enough to regard a librarian as glamorous, compare an old
professor to Rupert Brooke, listen with beating hearts to a lecture on
"the terrors and triumphs of setting out a bibliography correctly."
And in the end, their deepest sorrow is that they are unable to aban–
don this sweet naivete, yet much too sensible to allow themselves the
luxury of foolishness or hope. The absence of glitter from their lives
is only made the sorrier by the absence of illusions ; the inalienable
sadness of Pym's forgotten characters lies less in the drabness of their
lives than in their steady and unsentimental acknowledgement of
that drabness. Both of the quotations that conclude the previous
paragraph are placed in the person of the heroine; elsewhere, she
asks, almost rhetorically, "Do we all correct proofs, make
bibliographies and indexes, and do all the other rather humdrum
thankless tasks for people more brilliant than ourselves?" Beyond
making sympathetic those characters who seem charmless from the
outside, Pym manages to convey the ache of their knowledge that
they will never by themselves win sympathy from outsiders.
Pym's women are, in addition, much too practical to linger on
their disappointments: they recognize that these must be borne
bravely, and alone. And their sadness is tenacious because it in–
volves no bitterness and no prospect of epiphany. Their lives, the
heroine thinks, have "the inevitability of Greek drama." But in real–
ity, of course, her life proves to be all inevitability and no drama, all
sorrow and no sweep. It is not a dark star that hangs over such
destinies, just a very dim one. Howard's characters fly on the wings
of reverie to a Brontean heath; Pym's women visit that magic place
fleetingly, but are doomed to awaken almost immediately, aware
that theirs was an unattainable dream and that they must attend in–
stead to the daily round.
Though Pym's devices are certainly as careful as Howard's,
they refuse to draw attention to themselves. Pym is content to allow
features to remain features without becoming themes. Thus the
names in her novel are by no means carelessly chosen, but nor are
they transparent: the still pretty, but entirely unromantic heroine is
called "Dulcie" (though she does in a moment of panic seize upon the
alias of Miss Lamb).
