Why do I care about Jane Austen’s ordinary people but not Barbara Pym’s?

I quit on Jane and Prudence after about 50 pages. 

Some of you will probably say I’m missing the point, but Barbara Pym writes about the trivial thoughts of trivial people, and I simply don’t care. 

The novel is about Jane, a vicar’s wife who has just moved with her husband to another parish in a village, and Prudence, her younger and single friend (at 29!), who lives in London and is in love with her married boss Arthur Grampian.  

When we see Prudence in the office, Barbara Pym gives us several pages of the women talking about wanting tea, making tea, telling each other they run out of tea, discussing what to do when they don’t have tea for Dr Grampian, deciding Prudence should borrow the tin of coffee from Mr Manifold, and so on and so forth. Later Prudence goes to lunch, Pym painstakingly describes all her thoughts and action during the lunch, then: 

“She was just walking to the cash desk to pay her bill when she noticed a young man sitting at one of the tables. It was Mr Manifold. He was eating – perhaps ‘tucking into’ would describe it better – the steamed pudding which Prudence had avoided as being too fattening. She had never seen him eating before and now she averted her eyes quickly, for there was something indecent about it, as if a mantle had fallen and revealed more of him than she ought to see. Of course the women in the office had known that he lunched somewhere – indeed, they had even speculated on where he went; perhaps the vastness of the Corner House swallowed him up or the manly security of a public-house lapped him round. Prudence hurried out of the restaurant feeling disturbed and irritated. Had he ever been there before, she wondered? She hoped he wasn’t going to make a habit of frequenting the places she went to. It would be annoying if she had to change her own routine.” (ch.4)

These are such small, trivial thoughts. 

It’s the same when Pym switches to the vicar’s wife. Because Jane has such a small mind, we don’t see her thinking about the new church, or nature, or religion, or anything interesting; she just thinks about small, mundane stuff.   

“At last Mrs Crampton emerged from behind the velvet curtain carrying two plates on a tray. She put in front of Jane a plate containing an egg, a rasher of bacon and some fried potatoes cut in fancy shapes, and in front of Nicholas a plate with two eggs and rather more potatoes.

Nicholas exclaimed with pleasure.

‘Oh, a man needs eggs!’ said Mrs Crampton, also looking pleased.

This insistence on a man’s needs amused. Jane. Men needed meat and eggs – well, yes, that might be allowed; but surely not more than women did? Perhaps Mrs Crampton’s widowhood had something to do with it; possibly she made up for having no man to feed at home by ministering to the needs of those who frequented her cafe.

[…] ‘Poor Mr Oliver,’ said Jane, scenting pathos. He certainly looked very pale reading the Lessons on Sunday evenings, but perhaps that was just a trick of the lighting. She hurried to finish her egg and bacon in case he should come in and see them at it without being able to have it himself.

[…] Mrs Crampton now returned and set down before Mr Oliver a plate laden with roast chicken and all the proper accompaniments. He accepted it with quite as much complacency as Nicholas had accepted his eggs and bacon and began to eat.

Jane turned away, to save his embarrassment. Man needs bird, she thought. Just the very best, that is what man needs.” (ch.5) 

I give you a long excerpt so you can see what I’m talking about. All these characters are boring, banal: 

“Fabian Driver, doing his pre-lunch drinking in the bar of the Golden Lion, looked out and saw Nicholas and Jane walking home. He had a confused feeling of irritation and envy as he watched them. It must have been Jane’s smiling up at her husband and the awful old coat she was wearing, the kind of coat a woman could wear only in her husband’s presence, he thought.” (ibid.)  

That’s what most people are like, you may say, but I really don’t care for all these trivial thoughts of these trivial people. I had a similar complaint about Cecilia: Frances Burney undoubtedly has great talent for capturing the characters’ voices and it could be very funny, but do I want that many pages of frivolous people talking about frivolous stuff? I do not. 

But that raises some interesting questions. Chekhov also writes about ordinary people, Jane Austen also depicts a small world, Flaubert also portrays shallow and banal people—why is it that they make me care about their characters and what happens to them? What separates them from Barbara Pym? Why do I care about what happens to Emma Bovary, for instance, when she is so hollow? 

(I’ve been thinking about this subject for some time. When I first read Jane Austen, I thought her characters didn’t have the depth or complexity of Tolstoy’s characters. And yet to me they’re alive, and many of them have lived with me over the years, like Tolstoy’s characters. I have often said my favourite Austen novel is Mansfield Park, followed by Persuasion, but over the past year or so, I’ve found myself often thinking about Pride and Prejudice, especially Mr and Mrs Bennet). 

Of course, some of you might say you don’t like Jane Austen because it’s such a circumscribed world, or you don’t like Flaubert because Emma Bovary is so shallow compared to Anna Karenina—it’s personal taste and perhaps these questions are more for myself. But Jane Austen, Flaubert, and Chekhov—regardless of personal taste—are all canonical, influential authors, whereas Frances Burney and Barbara Pym don’t quite have the same status. And if we broaden the question, realist novelists address the everyday and write about ordinary people—not all of them depict the whole society and not all of them write about big questions (like life and death, God’s existence, or the meaning of life)—how do they do it? How do they get us to care about their characters? 

Let’s discuss.