Felicity & Barbara Pym by Harrison Solow

Stunning literary non-fiction from Wales writer in residence and winner of a 2009 Pushcart Prize

Felicity and Barbara Pym is a cross-genre (fiction & non-fiction) literary work that has its roots in Harrison Solow’s own search as an undergraduate for “ a magnificently unified microcosm” of the world. Felicity is the silent fictional student with a “happy disregard” for centuries of interrelated scholarship intrinsic to a liberal arts education, including a disregard for the tools of study and a blithe preoccupation with the present. As Harrison Solow says, Barbara Pym’s work is hardly at the heart of a liberal education, but she is the antithesis to this prevailing attitude and her work has been undervalued. Appreciation is not perhaps what universities requests of students, says Solow, but this book is a work of literary appreciation via reasonable examination based on the premise that all subjects are interrelated.

What appear to be books about “Silly men, Mousy women, Tea, Religion, Quotations,” books in which apparently “nothing happens” are in fact novels that open up the world, novels that deal with youth, feminism, scepticism, cynicism, thoughtlessness, expectation, and so much more, concealed within “the economy of expression Miss Pym employs.” So writes the protagonist, Mallory Cooper to her reluctant literature student, Felicity. Beautifully observed, Felicity and Barbara Pym is a rare thing – a book of non-fiction that is also fictional, creative and literary in its own right. Written in an epistolary style, the narrator impresses on her pupil the importance of small things – “Minutia is their sustenance and their charm, which is why Pym is so essentially English,” she writes.

American writer Harrison Solow has received many awards for her literary fiction, nonfiction, cross-genre writing, poetry and professional writing, most notably winning the prestigious Pushcart Prize for Literature in 2008. Her most recent award is First Prize for Short Fiction in the Carpe Articulum Literary Review International Competition for 2010.

She has lectured at a number of universities, colleges, arts and cultural institutions in the United States, Canada and Great Britain. A former
faculty member at UC Berkeley, she accepted a lectureship in the English Department of the University of Wales in 2004 and was appointed Writer in Residence in 2008. She returned to America in 2009 to write her third and fourth books and has been offered a post in an American university in 2011.

Her Cinnamon Press Title, Felicity & Barbara Pym was awarded a Welsh Books Council Grant.

Solow is a Welsh speaker, a strong proponent of the traditional Liberal Arts, the Fine Arts and the Utilitarian Arts as separate and equally
respectable entities, an advocate for Wales and a patron of literary endeavours. She is a member of The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics
and Writers, The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The National Association of Scholars, The Women’s Faculty Club of the University of California, Berkeley, The Association of Welsh Writers in English, The Claremont Institute, The Association for Core Texts and Courses, The Red Room, The Association of Writing Programs, Yr Academi Cymreg (The Welsh Academy), and The National Coalition of Independent Scholars, where she served on the Board in 2009 and 2010.

Harrison lives in California with her husband, Herbert F. Solow, the former Head of MGM, Paramount and Desilu Studios in Hollywood. She has two sons.