This weekend sees the centenary celebration of Barbara Pym, a writer compared in a recent article by Salon's Laura Miller to Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, EF Benson, Stella Gibbons and Agatha Christie's Jane Marple.

With the BBC for once seemingly letting a literary anniversary pass unnoticed, no national organisation is putting the bunting out for a novelist known for social comedies featuring village jumble sales, unrequited love and clergymen (averaging 5.76 vicars per novel, James Runcie – who made a Pym TV biopic starring Patricia Routledge – has calculated). And that's fitting too – being overlooked or turned down was a recurring experience for Pym, as for her heroines.

For 16 years amid the un-Pymian hullabaloo of the 60s and early 70s, she was out of fashion (as was Austen) and couldn't get published until Philip Larkin and others championed her; back in print in 1977, she made the Booker prize shortlist with Quartet in Autumn, three years before her death.
These stories of rejection and rediscovery will doubtless be retold at St Hilda's College, Oxford (an alma mater Pym shares with several authors, Wendy Cope and Val McDermid among them), as the Barbara Pym Society gathers. The highlight, tea and biscuits apart, looks to be a walk from the railway station around locations connected with Pym and Larkin. Only a cynic would suggest it might be called off if there's a risk of sunshine.

At a livelier event in March at Harvard, her American fans enjoyed a church service, singing the society song, "Unsuitable Things" (to the tune of "My Favourite Things"), papers including one on food in Pym, and champagne and cupcakes at their AGM.

In the US – where a perfume called Paperback, billed as smelling like "a dusty old copy of a Barbara Pym novel", is available – the BPS's US arm seems keener on "doing a Jane Austen" on her, judging by the mugs, tea-towels and other merchandising on its website. Who wouldn't want a Barbara Pym "tea-bag rest", a snip at $5?