The Small, Dark Pleasures of Barbara Pym : A LOT TO ASK; A Life of Barbara Pym <i> By Hazel Holt (Dutton: $19.95; 308 pp.) </i>

That a young unmarried woman must be in want of a husband is a truth still universally acknowledged. That she might not find one--if she lived in England between the two world wars--was taken nearly as much for granted. The spinster’s role lay in making do, keeping out of other people’s way, staying cheerful, scraping together a living, putting up with loneliness and delighting in small pleasures.

This is the world of Barbara Pym’s novels and of Barbara Pym herself. She was born in Oswestry, a market town in Shropshire, in 1913 and grew up as a happy child in a happy family. In 1931 she went up to St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, to read English. Always a scribbler, she began her first novel, helped by her capacity to invent sagas and characters. For herself she created an alternative persona called “Sandra” who wore scarlet silk blouses and tight black skirts and was “rather fast”.

She was one of those girls halfway between plain and pretty. Tall, with wavy brown hair, nice legs and a passion for clothes, she felt her looks were marred by two prominent front teeth, which she tried to hide with a crooked smile.

At Oxford she had plenty of boyfriends and was herself “rather fast.” She chased people who took her fancy but, said one of her lovers, out of friendliness rather than sensuality.

She fell in love promiscuously too, often with people she did not know--bank clerks, dons, clergymen. Real or imagined, her lovers tended to leave her with a sense of yearning which she could only excise by writing. When she learned that Henry Harvey, whom she longed to marry, had married a Finnish girl, she began a novel set in Finland. It did not lessen the hurt.

Pym was never to marry, in spite of two offers. During the war she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service. Afterward she made her home with her divorced sister in a flat in a pleasant London suburb. They took walks by the Thames and kept cats. For many years she edited a journal at the International African Institute near Fleet Street (where Hazel Holt, now her biographer, was a colleague). She loved indexing and filing. Some of her best characters were typists.

In 1950, with the publication of “Some Tame Gazelle,” a novel she had begun at Oxford, her extraordinary writing gift was recognized. By 1961 she had published six novels, all acclaimed for their delicacy, irony and recreation of small, quiet corners of English life. The best of these, “Excellent Women” (1952), drew the first of the now-standard comparisons with Jane Austen.

But Pym is darker than Austen. Her gentle world of vicars, librarians, schoolteachers and antique dealers is savage at its core. The Irish Times said of “Excellent Women” that “under a varnish of superb comedy . . . there lurks a most poignant tragedy.” Some years later, poet Philip Larkin called the book “a study of the pain of being single, the unconscious hurt the world regards as this state’s natural clothing.”

Pym wrote to get the pain out of her system, but writing is a cure which carries its own disease. In 1958, when she submitted “An Unsuitable Attachment,” her publisher, Cape, unexpectedly and emphatically rejected it.

It was a crippling blow. Although she continued to have unsuitable romantic attachments, as her biographer tellingly remarks: “Her books had replaced her love affairs as the chief preoccupation of her life, and in this rejection she felt all the cumulative pain of her early unhappiness.”

For 14 years she could get nothing published. Luckily for her, and for posterity, she had found in the bachelor poet Larkin, whom she had never met, the best pen pal a girl ever had. He encouraged her to keep on writing, lobbied on her behalf and refused to let her disparage herself. When as the years passed she moaned, “Here I am sixty-one (it looks worse spelled out in words) and only six novels published--no husband, no children,” he replied, “Didn’t J. Austen write six novels, and not have a husband or children?”

But fate was unkind. A lump in the breast in 1971 led to a mastectomy, which she accepted cheerfully: “Of course it doesn’t show at all when one is dressed.” After a second operation she retired to full-time country life, sharing a cottage near Oxford with her sister and immersing herself in church work. One day at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, she and Larkin shyly met for the first time, for tea. They were not disappointed in each other. Their fruitful correspondence continued.

In January, 1977, the London Times Literary Supplement published a list, chosen by eminent literati, of the most underrated writers of the century. Barbara Pym was the only living writer to be named twice, the choice of both Larkin and Lord David Cecil.

As if in a burst of contrition, the London literary world dragged her from oblivion. Macmillan offered to publish her most recently rejected novel, “Quartet in Autumn.” Belated lionization began. She was amused to hear that she was being “taught” in American universities. At Christmas, 1979, having sent another new novel, “A Few Green Leaves,” off to Macmillan, she went into a hospice, taking her notebook with her in the prospect of new material. She died a few weeks later, before any of her new books appeared.

“Why is it that men find my books so sad?” she once asked a close male friend. “Women don’t particularly. Perhaps they (men) have a slight guilt feeling that this is what they do to us, and yet really it isn’t as bad as all that.”

Isn’t it? Pym was the victim of a terrible literary injustice. When Macmillan in 1982 brought out “An Unsuitable Attachment,” the Washington Post said, “The publisher must have been mad to reject this jewel” and the New York Times called it “A paragon of a novel . . . witty, elegant, suggesting beyond the miniature exactness the vast panorama of a vanished civilization.”

This touching biography is marred by the biographer’s own lack of confidence. Holt quotes too much from her beloved subject and gives too little of her own judgment; pages of text full of indented paragraphs are hard on the eye. But Holt has served her friend well, with a book which will serve equally to illuminate or to introduce the world of Barbara Pym.