10. A Genetic and Biographical Analysis of Barbara Pym’s Companion Character

Jessie Morrow, the paid companion of the elderly Miss Doggett, is a prominent character in Barbara Pym’s fictional world. The first time Pym wrote about Jessie was in a 1939-40 draft of Crampton Hodnet, and the final iteration (and the only contemporaneously published version) of Jessie is in Jane and Prudence (1953). In between these two appearances of Jessie, Pym created similar companion characters. In the span of roughly ten years, Pym’s characterisation of the companion significantly changed via these variants across her manuscripts and typescripts. There is minimal scholarship that examines the transformations, which may be due to the minimal endogenetic material that would be useful in a genetic analysis — drafts, typescripts, and sketches — on the companion character in the ten-year period between the first and last iteration of Jessie. Expanding the endogenesis to include Pym’s diaries and letters facilitates a study of Pym’s creative process; on the ‘narrative’ level of narratology, the consideration of autobiographic material allows an interpretation of the characterisation changes that Pym made to Jessie and her companion ‘variants.’ There is a tendency in studies of Pym and of her work to read her characters as stand-ins for Pym herself. This chapter postulates that the companion character is not a mirror image of Pym, but rather a persona adopted on-the-page in tandem with the fictive personae Pym adopted off-the-page throughout her life.