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The Appeal of the Handsome Beast:
Barbara Pym and Her Friends / Less Than Angels

The Barbara Pym Society 31^st Annual Conference
28-30 August 2026
St Hilda’s College, Oxford

We are pleased to announce that Honorary Life Member Sir Alexander McCall Smith is our keynote speaker, addressing the idea and moral theory of sympathy in the light of Barbara Pym’s feeling for her characters. From his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series to his Isabel Dalhousie novels (Isabel reads Barbara Pym, of course!) Sir Sandy delights a world-wide readership.

The rest of the conference programme will also be fascinating and includes: the world of women in 1930s Oxford addressed by Dr Florence Smith, Lecturer in Modern British History at University College, Oxford; the Emmy Award winning costume designer and men’s clothing historian Alex Fordham presenting what the Handsome Beast would have worn in the 1930s-50s; Catherine Oliphant’s magazine work in Less Than Angels, through which she could spin her experience with Handsome Beasts into a living, considered by Dr Perri Klass; and a talk by Dr Joanna de Groot, Barbara Pym’s god-daughter, whose mother Rosemary Topping was Barbara’s great friend and yet another St Hilda’s woman with an astonishing war and post-war career.

Loving the wrong men is an occupational hazard for the human race, and Barbara Pym thoroughly understood the appeal of the handsome beast. She wrote beautifully about the pleasure and pain involved, initially inspired by her experience as an Oxford student during the 1930s.

A prime example of her fictional handsome beasts appears in her fourth novel, Less Than Angels. Everyone is attracted to Tom Mallow, many women love him, but he is never really touched. He breaks things, as the modern saying goes, but he is not setting out to be cruel or destructive. He doesn’t pay enough attention to be kind, or even decent, to the people he attracts. Barbara Pym doesn’t paint him as a villain, but she kills him – her only murder of a major character.

Barbara Pym’s characters often fail to resist the appeal of the handsome beast. The way they survive, forgive and even smile is one of the great pleasures of her fiction. All this will be explored in the Barbara Pym Society 2026 Conference. Our full programme is available HERE.