A first novel--and it shows. Has all the charm of Barbara Pym's best work (Excellent Women, No Fond Return of Love) but is marred by narrative clumsiness and (frankly) lousy technique: characters appear out of nowhere, conversations start one place and end in another, etc. Skip this and focus on her later, great work.

Some Tame Gazelle is an early Barbara Pym
novel, but her many strengths are fully in evidence. She shows that she knows her way with provincial village life, which she portrays in neither a fond haze nor quite in the harsh light of reality, but in some alternative dimension, like our own, but somehow a bit more kind. The protagonists are two "Pym women", middle-aged, content, educated middlebrows, shrewd, amusing, humble and yet quite self-possessed. The central joke--"spinsters" doting on the local clergy--is soon lost in the subtle but larger point: these are two women who live life largely on their own terms, affectations and all. This is a good read, not at all an "early" novel. My only real criticism is that the plot seems to spin a bit in mid-novel, but it rights itself again by the end.

In the early chapters of "Some Tame Gazelles" we are taken on a "Pym moments" romp through the day-to-day lives of the spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede. Timid, sentimental Belinda (one of Pym's "Excellent Women")elder of the two, a faithful church worker, has loved the peevish, married Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve ("dear Henry") for over 30 years. Belinda quotes 18th Century poets, wears "sensible" shoes and longs for "some sympathetic person to whom she could say that Dr. Johnson had been so right when he had said that all change is of itself an evil." Plump ("attractive in a fat Teutonic way"),jolly and style-conscious Harriet, in her middle fifties, has a fondness for young curates to whom she serves boiled chicken suppers and makes presents of hand-knitted socks and home-made jellies. We meet: The Reverend Edgar Donne, the latest in a long line of young curates fussed over by Harriet; Edith Liversidge ("a kind of decayed gentlewoman"), the disheveled, blunt-speaking neighbor with an interest in sanitation arrangements; the dreary, snobbish Connie Aspinall, who basks in the memory of her glory days when she was companion to Lady Grudge of Belgrave Square ("a kind of relation of one of Queen Alexandra's Ladies-in-Waiting"); Miss Prior, the touchy sewing woman, in a tender and humorous episode involving cauliflower cheese; the melancholy Count Ricardo Bianco, who on a regular basis offers proposals of marriage to Harriet. There is Archdeacon Hoccleve, the object of Belinda's devotion ("her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning"), whose standoffish behavior and proclivity for choosing unsuitable prayers and for preaching obscure literary sermons no one understands win him little favor among the people in his parish. And there are more matchless Pym characters set against a quintessential Pym story, touching and funny and quite wonderful.