This is a wonderfully accomplished farce beginning with the joke of using her own name in the title (Barbara Mary Crampton Pym). From that point she sails off into a wickedly comedic farce, focusing- in recognizingly "Pym" fashion- on the unsuitable romantic entanglements of a curate and a pretty young girl, both of whom live in the same rooming house, and a starry-eyed university professor and his female student.

Crampton Hodnet

Literature & Fiction

Barbara Pym

Contemporary

HarperCollins, Publishers

In A FEW GREEN LEAVES the author combines the rural settings of her earliest novels with many of the themes- and even some of the characters- of her later ones. Switching points of view among many characters, she builds with accumulating effect the picture of life in a town forgotten by time yet affected dramatically by it. Historical time- represented by Druid ruins, the local eighteenth-century country manor, and the last aristocrats who occupied it in the 1920s- is juxtaposed against the banalities of life in today's world.

A Few Green Leaves

Flamingo

Well dressed and looked after, Wilmet is married to Rodney, a handsome army Major, working nine thirty to six at the Ministry. Wilmet's interest wanders to the nearby Anglo-Catholic church, where at last she can neglect her comfortable household in the company of three priests and Piers Longridge.

A Glass of Blessings

Perennial Library

The Sweet Dove Died / Excellent Women / Quartet in Autumn

Haper & Row

When Barbara Pym died in January 1980, this unpublished novel was found among her papers - written in 1963, at a time when her work was out of fashion. The publication after nineteen years of An Unsuitable Attachment therefore became an important literary event and a source of joy for her many fans. Set in St Basil's, an undistinguished North London parish, An Unsuitable Attachment is indeed full of the high comedy for which she is famed. There is Mark Ainger, the vicar, who introduces his sermons with remarks like Those of you who are familiar with the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.' His wife Sophia with her cat, I feel sometimes that I can't reach Faustina as I've reached other cats.' Rupert Stonebird, anthropologist and eligible bachelor. The well-bred Ianthe Broome who works at the library and forms an unsuitable attachment with a young man there. The sharp-tongue Mervyn Cantrell, chief librarian, who complains that when books have things spilt on them it is always bottled sauce or gravy of the thickest and most repellent kind rather than something utterly exquisite and delicious.' There is also Daisy Pettigrew, the vet's sister, another obsessional cat person, and Sister Dew who bears a strong resemblance to Sister Blatt in Excellent Women. These and many more incidental characters come under Barbara Pym's microscope. Phillip Larkin sums up what An Unsuitable Attachment means to Pym's legion of admirers in his fascinating introduction, saying, It is richly redolent of her unique talent ...her followers will need no further recommendation.'

An Unsuitable Attachment (Perennial Library)

Harper&Row

The Misses Bede occupy the central crossroads of parish life. Then, into their quiet lives comes a famous librarian, Nathaniel Mold, and a bishop from Africa, Theodore Grote - who each take to calling on the sisters for rather unsettling reasons.

Some tame gazelle

Literary

Between the amorous antique dealer Humphrey and his good-looking nephew James glides the magnificent Leonora, delicate as porcelain, cool as ice. Can she keep James in her thrall? Or will he be taken from her by a lover, like Phoebe ...or Ned, the wicked American? 'A highly distinctive and - ultimately - charitable novel' - "Financial Times". 'Faultless' - "Guardian". 'Her Characters are all meticulously impaled on the delicate pins of a wit that is as scrupulous as it is deadly' - "Observer". 'A coldly funny book' - "Sunday Telegraph". 'Highly distinctive ...the critics who have recently insisted on Miss Pym's too long neglected gifts have not been wrong' - "Financial Times".

The Sweet Dove Died

Perennial / HarperCollins

Excellent Women is probably the most famous of Barbara Pym's novels. The acclaim a few years ago for this early comic novel, which was hailed by Lord David Cecil as one of 'the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years,' helped launch the rediscovery of the author's entire work. 

A witty comedy about the complications of being a spinster (and a religious one, at that) in the England of the 1950s. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a spinster in the England of the 1950s, one of those 'excellent women' who tend to get involved in other people's lives. She sees herself as "capable of dealing with most of the stock situations of life -- birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sales, the garden fete spoilt by bad weather." Mildred, her new neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Napier, and the vicar, Julian Malory, have real qualities, beliefs and a disarming sense of humor.

Excellent Women

A glass of blessings

JONATHAN CAPE.

Jonathan Cape, London

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Books by Barbara Pym

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Barbara Pym. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Crampton Hodnet

A Few Green Leaves

A Glass of Blessings

The Sweet Dove Died / Excellent Women / Quartet in Autumn

An Unsuitable Attachment (Perennial Library)

Some tame gazelle

The Sweet Dove Died

Excellent Women

A glass of blessings

Some tame gazelle