Anyone who has ever listened to the thump of a rejected manuscript descending cheerlessly on to the mat can take comfort from the roller-coaster career of Barbara Pym. Between 1950 and 1961 Miss Pym (1913–1980) had published six modestly successful novels with the firm of Jonathan Cape. Then, on 24 March 1963 — ‘a sobering fourth Sunday in Lent’, as Ann Allestree is careful to remind us — came a bolt from the skies, in the shape of a letter from Cape’s editorial director, Wren Howard, turning down the seventh with the age-old publisher’s bromide that ‘in present conditions we...