International records / OpenAlex research

The Quest for a Career

‘Life in 1977. Concorde, costing I don’t know how many millions, flies over our heads, clearly visible from our cottage window, while the road outside is full of potholes as in the 16th-century.’ 1 Barbara Pym recorded this incongruity between the old and the very new in a winter letter to her long-time friend and confidant Robert Smith, who had left England in 1959 to teach history in a Nigerian university. Perhaps she herself was feeling like a relic from the past in a modern world, for sixteen frustrating years had elapsed since publishers had last accepted her fiction. She had written six …