An Academic Question

An Academic Question is a novel by Barbara Pym, written in the early 1970s and published posthumously in 1986.

Synopsis
Caroline 'Caro' Grimstone is the wife of a sociology lecturer in a small West Country university town. While her husband Alan is fascinated by dinner party discussions of African anthropology and minor academic points, Caro is growing tired of the dull town and her pale marriage, and feels unfulfilled by her position as the mother of their 4-year-old daughter Kate. She undertakes voluntary work at a nursing home, reading to an elderly and nearly blind retired missionary, the Reverend Mr Stillingfleet. Alan realises that Stillingfleet possesses an unpublished manuscript in their shared field of anthropology. Concerned that the manuscript will be lost – or, worse, bequeathed to a rival – Alan accompanies his wife on one of her visits to read to Stillingfleet and steals the manuscript, which allows him to write a ground-breaking paper.

Caro begins to regret the theft, and to develop suspicions that Alan is having an affair with a colleague, Iris Horniblow. She seeks the guidance of her friends Kitty, a self-absorbed English woman who has spent much of her adult life in the Caribbean, Kitty's effete, gossipy son Coco, and her sister Dolly, a spinster who cares for a large family of hedgehogs in her back garden. Alan admits that he has had a fling with the assistant editor of the journal that is publishing the article that owes so much to Stillingfleet's manuscript.

Caro goes to stay with her mother and then with her sister, and then returns home. The fling fades into the background and the marriage resumes its course. The manuscript, which has caused so much chaos, is clandestinely returned by Caro to 'the Stillingfleet collection', but then destroyed in a fire started accidentally by (mildly) protesting students on Bonfire Night.

Publication history
Pym commenced writing the novel in 1970 and completed the first draft in 1971. Pym's last novel had been published in 1961, and she had been rejected by publishers since. At the time, Pym had no expectations for her "academic novel", writing "[p]erhaps my immediate circle of friends will like to read it". Pym intended the novel to be "a sort of Margaret Drabble effort", but it turned out very different and she was ultimately dissatisfied with the novel. She put it aside and never revised it.

Pym left two drafts of An Academic Question, one as a first-person narrative and one in the third person. After Pym's death, her literary executor Hazel Holt revised the work for publication from a combination of the two drafts. The novel was published posthumously in 1986, by Macmillan in England and E. P. Dutton in the United States. The novel was released as an audiobook in the 1980s by Chivers Press, read by Angela Pleasence. The novel was published in Germany in 1991 as Die Frau des Professors (The Professor's Wife), in France in 1992 as Une Question Purement Académique, and in Italy in 2019 as Una questione accademica.

Reception
The novel received mixed reviews, with most acknowledging its status as a draft. Kirkus Reviews called it "minor but still intriguing... on occasion, deliriously funny". The New York Times called the novel "one of Pym's paler efforts" but noted that Pym remained "one of the most engaging novelists of this century".

Connections to other works
Pym's novels routinely feature characters from her previous works. The characters of Sister Dew from An Unsuitable Attachment and Digby Fox from Less than Angels reappear. Most notably, this novel features the memorial service for Esther Clovis, a character who had appeared in three previous Pym novels starting with Excellent Women. The memorial service is seen from the point of view of Caro Grimstone, who did not know Miss Clovis and thus is attempting to piece together the woman's personality from the details of her service. The memorial service will be seen a second time, from a different perspective, in Pym's final novel A Few Green Leaves.