Barbara Mary Crampton Pym (2 June 1913 – 11 January 1980) was an English novelist. In the 1950s she wrote a series of social comedies, of which the best known are Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958). In 1977 her career was revived when the biographerDavid Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin both nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Her novel Quartet in Autumn (1977) was nominated for the Booker Prize that year, and she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was born on 2 June 1913 in Oswestry, Shropshire. She was privately educated at Queen’s Park School, a girls' school in Oswestry. From the age of twelve, she attended Huyton College, near Liverpool. She went on to study English at the University of Oxford (St Hilda's College).

During World War II she served in the Women's Royal Naval Service.

Pym worked at the International African Institute in London for some years, and contributed to editing its scholarly journal, Africa. This inspired her use of anthropologists as characters in her novels.

No Fond Return of Love is a novel by Barbara Pym, first published in 1961. It has been adapted for radio by the BBC.

The novel concerns the love lives of Viola Dace and her friend Dulcie Mainwaring, who are both attracted to the same man, Aylwin Forbes. Dulcie and Viola set about discovering more about his background.

In this novel, the author herself make a cameo appearance in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock. This is something she did in one or two of her novels, and it contrasts with the apparently conventional nature of her works.

Pym is one of the guests at the guest house with ‘bright Christian atmosphere’ in Taviscombe. She is described as ‘ordinary-looking and unaccompanied’ and consequently no one takes any notice of her, even though some of them had ‘read and enjoyed her books’. Her fellow guests do not realise that they are being observed.

Pym also had a habit of using major characters from one novel as minor ones in another, and here we see Wilmet, Piers, Keith and Rodney from A Glass of Blessings as tourists looking at the castle.