Author Barbara Pym may have worked for MI5, research suggests

New work says novelist, who was a censor during second world war, may been employed to look for coded messages

It is an irony that she herself would have revelled in: Barbara Pym, the author who punctured the social strictures of 20th-century Britain, worked as a censor during the second world war.

But research suggests that rather than just poring over the private letters that must have helped hone her talent, she may have also been working for MI5.