The Barbara Pym Society - Barbara Pym Society, We are an international literary society devoted to the 20th century English novelist Barbara Pym, shrewd observer of a certain kind of middle-class Englishwoman, no longer young and not quite beautiful, whom society finds it easy to overlook. She is just as shrewd an observer of the people that these women, vigilant and perceptive, themselves observe. The spinster heroine of Excellent Women, Pym’s most famous novel, says, “I suppose an unmarried woman just over 30, who lives alone and has no ap.