While her husband, Dr Alan Grimstone, 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.

For something to do, she undertakes voluntary work at a nursing home, reading to an elderly and nearly blind retired missionary, the Reverend Mr Stillingfleet.

But no sooner has the manuscript which has caused so much chaos been returned clandestinely than it is destroyed in a fire started accidentally by (mildly) protesting students on Guy Fawkes Night.

Now Crispin Maynard, Alan's recently retired professor, who has been threatening to consult the papers in order to refute his colleague, can no longer turn the academic question into a field of contention.

After Pym's death, her sister Hilary and her literary executor Hazel Holt revised the work for publication from a combination of her notes and the two drafts.

[7] Its immediate inspiration was a wrangle in Africa, the academic journal of the International African Institute that Pym was editing at the time of writing.

[10] However, John Bayley, writing for the London Review of Books, considered it "as readable and characteristic as any in the Pym canon…The spontaneity of the humour is fundamental to this novelist's unique marriage of art and life.

[13] Kate Saunders, introducing the 2012 reedition of the novel, points out that Pym even includes herself and her sister Hillary in its course: "Two women who had retired from jobs in London came to lunch.