CHRIS KOENIG returns to Finstock where a blue plaque honours a famous author who lived in the village

Last week I wrote about Finstock's Friendly Society, set up in the 19th century to help villagers through hard times. This week I was intrigued to discover that novelist Barbara Pym lived there.

She spent the last years of her life in the village during the 1970s, and in 2006 a blue plaque was put up to her memory on the modest home, Barn Cottage, she shared with her younger sister, Hilary. I was intrigued to come across it as I had just finished reading her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, and become an instant fan, and had, by coincidence, just been lent Places: An Anthology of Britain, in which appeared her month-by-month notes on a year in West Oxfordshire.

Poignantly enough, Places was published by OUP - with proceeds to Oxfam - in 1981, the year after Barbara Pym died of cancer at Sobell House Hospice in Oxford. It consists of contributions from well-known authors and poets, chosen by Ronald Blythe.

But anyone reading Barbara Pym must get used to dodging about in time. For instance, she wrote Some Tame Gazelle in 1935, all about two unassuming but churchey spinster sisters in their fifties living in a rural setting, some 30 years before she and Hilary did exactly that in Finstock.

Amazingly, the novel, though written shortly after she graduated from St Hilda's College, Oxford, where the Barbara Pym Society will this year hold its annual conference on August 9-10, failed to find a publisher until 1950.

Barbara Pym was born in 1913. At the age of 16, inspired by Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, she attempted her first book, Young Men in Fancy Dress, which now resides in the Pym Archives at the Bodleian Library.

What of the year she chronicled in Places? She prefaced it with the paragraph: "Every writer probably keeps some kind of diary or notebook, and my own (mercifully less personal and introspective as the years go on) has provided these few observations on the weather and natural surroundings, history and associations of the area."

For April she notes that four kittens were born in time for a warm Easter; then, immediately afterwards, comes the observation: "Finstock church is neither ancient nor particularly beautiful but it has the distinction of being the place where TS Eliot was received into the Church of England on 29 June 1927."

In August she visited nearby Ditchley Park, open to the public in that month. Bawdy poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, to whom she refers often in Some Tame Gazelle, was born here in 1647. She remarks "that his poems are hymns - to girls" and quotes: "My Love, thou art my way, my life, my light."

Diarist John Evelyn noted that Ditchley was in his day "a low timber house with a pretty bowling green". After Ditchley, Barbara Pym visited Spelsbury church where Rochester, who died at High Lodge, near Combe Gate in Blenheim Park, then part of the royal estate of Woodstock, is buried. She wrote: "In the churchyard outside is the large square-oblong tomb where the Cary family are said to be buried, but the top is broken and there is a scattering of bones (can they be human bones?), dry and grey-white."

Hers was a life of ups and downs when it came to literary success and failure. Throughout the fifties Jonathan Cape published her work. Then in 1963 her seventh book, An Unsuitable Attachment, was rejected for being old-fashioned. She and her writing were plunged into the wilderness.

Her fortunes were suddenly revived, however, when, in January 1977, both Philip Larkin and Oxford don Lord David Cecil, who lived down the road from Barbara Pym in Wilcote, named her in The Times Literary Supplement as "the most underrated novelist in the country".

Now the unassuming people of whom she writes, and the values they represent, are treasured by her many admirers. Still, I feel, she would be surprised to see that blue plaque on her Finstock cottage, commemorating her life (1913-1980).