Non-insistence

There is no aggression in Pym’s wish to “make you see,” as Conrad the novelist put it. She does not say to us, “I am going to make you feel like a spinster, a homosexual, a retired woman with anorexia whose only point of pride is to have had ‘major surgery,’ whose only joy is to have fallen in love with her surgeon.” As readers, we are more accustomed than we know to writers who are intent, perhaps honorably intent, on doing just that to us: making us feel, making us realize. Pym is totally innocent of this almost ubiquitous literary instinct—one that is as common in great writers like Dickens or Zola as it is in the host of inferior ones who want to give us their all in the form of themselves or their chosen characters.

Pym provides the comfort of total non-insistence.

John Bayley, “Barbara Pym as Comforter”