As the subtitle suggests, this is an autobiography of Barbara Pym made up of her diaries, letters, and notebooks. I wanted to read this first, before Paula Byrne's biography, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, so that I could form my own opinions from the primary sources. The diaries cover most of Pym's early life from being an Oxford undergraduate through to the end of the Second World War. These are interspersed with letters to her Oxford friends. After the war, there are bigger gaps in the diary. Pym then starts keeping writer's notebooks to mark significant days and capture conversations and scenes, which she uses in her novels.
The editors, Hazel Holt (a colleague from the International African Institute) and Hilary Pym (her younger sister), add useful summaries at the beginning of each section. It feels like they have a light touch, but I guess their main influence is in what they choose to include and leave out. They respect Pym's privacy by not filling in the deliberate gaps in her diary when pages are torn or cut out. (I'm learning that Paula Byrne's biography, which I'm currently reading, explains these gaps and conjectures what they are hiding.)
Pym, as ever, is good company. As a student, she's very sociable and gets involved in numerous love affairs with men, sometimes more than one at a time. However, she lets herself be taken advantage of. She has zero chill and develops unrequited infatuations. During the war she develops a sense of duty and female solidarity - although she again obsesses over an unattainable man. Then she joins the Wrens and goes to Naples for the end of the war.
On her return to London after the war, she gets a job, begins to write, keeps notebooks, and starts to publish novels. In the 1960s, she begins a lovely correspondence with Philip Larkin, which was how I got into Pym in the first place. This sees her through the 16 barren years when she went unpublished and also led to her renaissance with the help of Larkin and Lord David Cecil's endorsements in the TLS. These last years are happy but cut short by illness.
This is a lovely way to learn more about a writer's life: through her own words and private thoughts. It was a delightful read - particularly the letters to Larkin and the notebooks full of funny observations and mini scenes from novels. You really get a sense of her personality and how it developed over time.