In 1980, when Jane Nardin first came across the novels of Barbara Pym, as she remarks, 'almost no literary criticism had yet been written' of Pym's work, while Dale Salwak, in his epilogue to All This Reading, records the 'appearance since 1985 of twenty full-length book studies or anthologies, with more soon to arrive'. An extraordinary growth of interest, which is now further reflected in the publication of this stimulating collection of nineteen new essays. Part I examines the significance of reading in the novels; Part II is devoted to literary encounters and collaborations in Pym's life and works. Hazel Bell's index successfully draws together the threads running through the contributions by various hands, allowing the reader to trace, for example, references to spinsterhood in the essays of Frauke Elisabeth Lenckos, Katherine Anne Ackley, Barbara Everett, Helen Clare Taylor, Anthony Kaufman, Anne Pilgrim and Barbara Dunlap.

In attempts to pin down Pym's special quality as a novelist, she has been compared to, and with, a quite disparate list of writers, from Jane Austen to Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth von Arnim, E. M. Delafield and a whole host of other names, many listed by Lenckos in her introduction. Kaufman compares the rivalry of Belinda and Agatha in Some Tame Gazelle to the humour of E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia, and Everett commends Pym's 'high originality' which sets her fiction 'far above the intransigently reactionary ... Angela Thirkell'. Dunlap, tracing the influence on Pym of Charlotte M. Yonge, asserts that 'Pym's fiction is steeped in the work of Yonge' (even the unusual name of the heroine of A Glass of Blessings, Wilmet, is borrowed from a very different heroine of Yonge's).

To what extent are Pym's novels autobiographical, and her well-read heroines reflections of herself? Orphia Jane Allen, writing on 'Reading Pym Autobiographically', comments that 'Pym was aware that she could permit herself to become like Leonora' (in The Sweet Dove Died), but Leonora represents only 'one of the directions an aging, unmarried woman's life could take'. The most obvious incarnation of Pym's own personality is Belinda in Some Tame Gazelle, with her near-obsessive love of literary quotation. Pilgrim notes that, while Archdeacon Hoccleve and Bishop Grote quote aloud, sometimes not very felicitously, and Harriet 'tends to be oblivious to literary references', Belinda 'hardly ever quotes aloud, but silently recollects and meditates upon scores of passages, many of them quite obscure', and Nardin also finds significance in the fact that Belinda keeps her literary references to herself, 'restrained by a sense of personal modesty and strict propriety at once pathological and deeply lovable'. In being made privy to Belinda's interior monologue, the reader is at the same time granted access to the author's own stream of consciousness.

As Ackley points out, Pym 'often blurs the distinction between literature and life', suggesting in various ways that some of her characters have lives outside her fictional world. Dulcie in No Fond Return of Love, who cannot resist prying into people's lives, finds it 'so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of others'. Pym's characters, says Ackley, 'view the world as if they, too, were writers', and Nardin writes that 'in Pym's novels, there is a tension between the impulse to read and the impulse to contextualize or interpret'.

The inner monologues of Pym's heroines reveal her own uncertainties and need for reassurance. Pilgrim comments on Belinda's habitual alternation between self-doubt, 'expressed in her diffidence, timidity and constant anxiety', and self-confidence. Everett remarks on the unpretentiousness of Pym's early novels, and adds that the modesty of her approach 'possibly worked to Pym's disadvantage during the period when her manuscripts were being rejected' and 'makes her too easy to dismiss now'. Surveying the six earlier novels, she considers these thoroughly enjoyable but 'probably minor art', while Quartet in Autumn is to her mind a major work. She finds Excellent Women the 'most accomplished,... the most admirably competent', and has a kind word for An Unsuitable Attachment - it 'has a first-rate cat and a wholly believable public library'.

These are only some examples of the many rich insights provided by All This Reading. Further pleasures are provided in the second part of the volume, such as the reproduction in the essay by Paul De Angelis of Pym's letters to him of 1978-9, almost up to the time of her death in January 1980, and of A Year in West Oxfordshire, Pym's contribution to Ronald Blythe's anthology Places of 1981.

Janice Rossen's essay, 'Philip Larkin: Barbara Pym's Ideal Reader', discusses the crucial role played by 'virtually the only fellow writer with whom she discussed her work in progress'. Larkin's influence and advice were clearly of great importance to her: not only was he able to give her very specific and practical advice, but he was a writer of established reputation who treated her as an equal and gave her 'constant reassurances that her work was of extraordinary value'.

And not least, there is an account of thirty years of friendship and collaboration by Hazel Holt, Pym's literary executor, who tells us that she no longer reads Barbara Pym. 'I don't need to. ...once you've read the novels, she is with you forever.'

Eudora Welty found Pym's novels to be "quiet, paradoxical and sad." I think she described them perfectly. All this Reading explores the life, novels and publication of Pym. The book comprises a series of essays by many distinguised contributors. Educated at St. Hilda's college, Osford, she joined the Wrens during WWII and was posted to Naples. Her novels draw on her circle of college friends and her military life. Her writing highlights the theme "only connect" from Howard's End by Forster.
In Katherine Ackley's essay, she suggests Pym's characters are devoted to literature. They recite passages from an Austen novel or a Donne poem. Literature is a source of comfort to them. In John Bayley's essay, he further seees Pym as a comforter. He expands upon Matthew Arnold's theme that great art calms and comforts us, and he cites Pym as such a writer. Bayley notes that Pym's confidence about the sexes comes "from her sense of the arbitrary, almost ruthless, way they join up."
In "A Life Ruined by Literature", Elisabeth Lenckos argues that reading is a central theme in Pym's novels. The related topics of reading, romance and redemption are central in her novels. In A Few Green Leaves, the heroine Emma Howick recalls Austen's Emma. She stars in her own drama of misplaced affection, rejection and humiliation before leaving romantic fantasy behind. Lenckos suggests that Pym's world is like Austen's where the gentlewomen of reduced circumstances in post-war England have moved from manor houses to village cottages, and work part time in gentile jobs as librarians, clerks and social helpers.. "Like Austen's heroines their desire is to find a loving partner with whom to share life...." Those who love literature will find the nineteen essays in All this Reading satisfy every taste in a fine collection.

Jilly Cooper says that Barbara Pym's books remind her "of what is true.....about English life". In the case of A Glass of blessings, this refers to a very small, but significant part of 1950's English life in the 1950's, and Barbara Pym portrays it beautifully. Her characterisation is excellent, as are her descriptions. She must have been a very observant woman. To say that she is snobbish is unfair. She portrayed her part of the world as she saw it. And note that the very implicit sexual backdrop never has to be referred to explicitly at all.

Whetehr the fifties were "better" than now is open to doubt: but if you want a picture of a small part of 1950's England, then this is an enjoyable way to find it.

This is the most entertaining book I have read in a long time. I happened upon the Barbara Pym web page and there was a page of quotations from her novels that were very amusing, kind of off-the-wall. Usually, humor from another era seems very tame or just doesn't hold up. I looked for a copy of one of her books and came across an old paperback copy of this one at the public library. The perceptions of the lead character, Wilmet Forsyth, a 33 year old childless married woman with a lot of free time on her hands, make up the book. I could describe some of the events in the book which involve men she finds attractive and men who find her attractive, church functions, a homosexual relationship, etc. but I won't bother. Sex is never overtly mentioned or contemplated by Wilmet in this book. The portrayal of a gay couple in England in the 1950's fascinated me. Wilmet is so cautious and careful in her observations even though she is opinionated. I was happy she wasn't harsh toward these gay characters even though she is heavily involved in her church. Wilmet is not a really deep thinker, but she's funny and kind. Anyway, it's a fun book you should seek out.

The novel, "An Unsuitable Attachment," by Barbara Pym is set in an unfashionable suburb of London and revolves around a small group of characters who live there. The Vicar of St Basil's, Mark Ainger, the remote and unworldly husband of the lonely Sophie, heads the community. While Mark plans his next sermon, Sophie hopes that an attachment will form between her sister, Penelope, and the new resident bachelor, anthropologist, Rupert Stonebird. There is however, a slight complication to Sophie's matchmaking plans--a very eligible and eminently suitable spinster--Iantha Broome also moves into the parish.

In this quietly contained novel, the story gently unfolds as the characters form both suitable and unsuitable attachments. Rupert Stonebird contemplates relationships with both Penelope--the "poor pre-Raphaelite Beatnik" and the graceful, ladylike Iantha. Iantha, however, rather unexpectedly becomes the object of desire of no less than three men. Rupert is quite an expert on mating rituals of obscure tribes, but when faced with the mating rituals of his own class, he is flummoxed.

Edwin Pettigrew, the local veterinarian is too devoted to his furry patients to form an attachment to anyone, and his sister Daisy is attached only to the cats who come under her care--although she does draw the line at "undoctored ... and Siamese cats." Several people in the St Basil's congregation find Sophie's attachment to her cat, Faustina very unseemly--especially since Sophie is married to the vicar, but it is a holiday in Rome that sorts out which attachments--both suitable and unsuitable--will become permanent.

I adore Barbara Pym novels, and I frequently re-read all of them for the soothing, reassuring qualities they seem to possess. If you like Jane Austen, then no doubt you will also enjoy the novels of Barbara Pym. "An Unsuitable Attachment" is a subtle, gentle novel of manners--elegant, smooth, full of faded gentility and quiet eloquence--displacedhuman--Amazon Reviewer

Barbara Pym is often called the Jane Austen of our time. Insofar as she observes keenly the social intercourse, inconsistancies and mores of her own time and place, this is true. But do not regard her as a duplicate of anyone. Her dry, elegant observations reach their height in An Unsuitable Attachment, a meandering story which takes place in a London parish in the 1960's. Pym lightly delineates the social changes taking place in England through her assortment of characters. From the upper-middle-class vicar's wife Sophia, devoted to her aptly-named cat Faustina and her handsome if remote husband Mark, to the wistfully mod single Penelope, to the good-hearted if crude working-class Sister Dew, Pym represents the spectrum of generational and class attitudes, and the resultant clashes of understanding between these attitudes. In spare yet well-honed descriptions she evokes a post-war, newly prospering London, a city where exotic (meaning dark-skinned) immigrants live close by old-fashioned people whose relatives who come up by train from the country to open a parish bazaar. I lived in London not many years ofter this story is set, and the mix of characters, descriptions of streets and houses, and tone and pace brilliantly evoke the atmosphere of that wonderfully complex and vital city. The romance is fun, too.

I was thrilled to find a copy of this cookbook as it has recipes from several of Barbara Pym's novels. For instance, Poulet Nicoise is mentioned in Quartet in Autumn as is Oeufs Florentine. What a great idea to publish a cookbook for food mentioned in an author's novels. I can't wait to read her other novels and try the recipes from the cookbook. The recipe for Plum Jam on page 82 is delightful as supposedly Barbara was making plum jam when she received word that articles had been published about her novel Quartet in Autumn. Highly recommend this book for Barbara Pym fans.

The restraint and economy with which the author approaches her subject only enhance the richness of the work. With a wealth of detail,Hazel Holt sets the jewel of Pym's works in the setting of her life. For example, paraphrasing: "Hilary and I reckoned up the reasons people had left our parish church: Rome, Death, and Umbrage. Umbrage, of course, removed the greatest number." Those who have enjoyed Pym's work would do well to read this book before other secondary sources.

Pym's novel is beautifully written from the point of view of a thirty-something single clergy-man's daughters' point of view. Barbara Pym's characters are realistically drawn and thoroughly believable. Tea is forever being made, references to post-WWII London rations are skillfully described and the comedy is genuine. The heroine hasn't a self-pitying bone in her body. She's impossible not to love.

Don't leap to the assumption that a book written fifty years ago about an unmarried do-gooding gentle woman would have nothing for a contemporary audience. Despite its London church parish setting well populated with the spinsterish "excellent women" of the title, Pym's book delivers sharp observations about men and women, together and apart, and society's expectations for all. Her truths are pungent a sexual revolution later.

Relevancy aside, this is a good read. Pym lays out her well-defined world much as Jane Austen does, providing a critical and always witty tour. The characters are drawn as sharply as any Austen delivered. The novel is entertaining but rewardingly complex as it probes not only gender and social mores but also asks if Mildred Lathbury, the protagonist and narrator, is choosing the life of an excellent woman or if she is saddled with it. To use a contemporary phrase, it is about having a life, and this deceivingly gentle-seeming book is asking questions that are as rugged and significant as any asked in our less regulated times.

Mildred Lathbury is a hilariously sharp but kind observer as she becomes embroiled in the romantic messes of both the Father at her church and her exotic new neighbours. Along the way, Mildred reevaluates her own role as one of the "excellent women" who can always be relied upon for a hot cup of tea or help polishing church brasses.

Excellent Women often had me cackling out loud, though sometimes it was the kind of laughter that comes from giving the funny bone a solid whack on the table. The subject matter and understated humour justify comparisons with Austen's Persuasion though the tone and style remind me rather more of Rose MacAuley's Towers of Trebizond.

This was the second Barbara Pym book I have ever read and it confirmed to me that she is greatly underrated as a writer. Though not perhaps as brilliantly comic as Excellent Women, Sweet Dove Died is gently satirical in the most delicious way. The type of woman she deals with is, this time, the affected 'lady of a certain age', rather than the humble and worthy types. One could almost imagine that this is how Madame Bovary may have turned out, had she had lived a city life. There is nothing prudish about Pym and readers today may be struck by how 'modern' she still appears, particularly in her depiction of the younger male characters in this novel. Greatly enjoyable.

I happened upon this slim volume by accident the other day - and what a happy accident it turned out to be. Barbara Pym's "The Sweet Dove Died" is a novel of unrequited love - an unnatural love of an older woman for a much younger gay man. There are shades of the Tennessee Williams classic "The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone," yet the writing style is more akin to Patrick Gale's early works "The Aerodynamics of Pork" and "Kansas in August."
Pym's novels are what used to be called "comedies of manners." Her work is immediately engaging, always amusing, and quite pointed in its depiction of a woman so consumed with the appearence of perfection that she misses every opportunity for happiness.

Leonora Eyre is a vain, self-focused, middle-aged spinster whose fading beauty and sense of refinement attracts antique dealer Humphrey Boyce and his nephew, James when they meet--by-chance--at an antique auction. Humphrey's attraction to Leonora is very understandable, and they certainly have enough in common--a love of antiques, fine wines, expensive restaurants,and leisurely drives in the country. Leonora, however, while perfectly content to permit Humphrey's attentions--as long as they don't stray to the baser instincts--is far more attracted to James, and he's young enough to be her son. She enjoys having the exclusive attentions (and there's an emphasis on the word 'exclusive' here) of a handsome young beau, and she expects him to read to her, to soothe her forehead, and to generally lavish her with attention--just as long as the relationship isn't consumated. Leonora senses that James is content to accept the limitations of their relationship, but she also realises that Humphrey chafes against such restrictions.

For some reason, James finds himself accepting the role Leonora assigns him. Humphrey is a little perturbed, and even jealous of his rival, but he's at heart a rather simple, blustering chap, and so he consoles himself with the thought that Leonora must feel rather like a mother to his nephew--the motherless-James. It even crosses Leonora's mind to wonder exactly what her relationship is with James--she usually has nothing but mild contempt for females who make idiots of themselves for younger men. Leonora refuses to examine her relationship with James--just as she refuses to contemplate or confront any unpleasantness in life.

But what of James? He's a red-blooded, testosterone-infused male--why does he accept the eunuch's role in Leonora's life? To James, Leonora is made of "some brittle unreal substance," and their relationship is simultaneously intimate and remote. Why does he feel compelled to hide his relationship with the intriguing Phoebe? James doesn't understand himself or the relationships that are most important to him. He seems unable to control his relationships, and soon all the people in his life are on a collision course, and James is ill-prepared for the consequences.

This well-crafted novel of manners is a small masterpiece. Written with elegant brilliance by the greatly underrated Barbara Pym, this novel centres on relationships--the needs relationships fill, and the voids that remain, and the need humans have to convert love, ultimately, into possession of the beloved. Leonora and James are fascinating characters--perfect foils for Humphrey and Phoebe, and it is the relationship between Leonora and James that warrants the most scrutiny.

This is not some sappy romance or a love story. This is a novel of sterling calibre, and Pym should never be underestimated. She is an extremely skillful writer, and her novels have a consistent quality that do not disappoint.

Barbara Pym has been compared to Jane Austen. I think that the similarities lie in the two authors' portrayal of characters.

In Austen's world, and a century later in Pym's, the women had comparatively little to do. They have lunch or dinner with friends, attend parties or volunteer at church. But even so, they have great amounts of time left over for introspection. Therein lies the beauty of both authors' stories. Who else could make such ordinary, uneventful lives seem interesting, even gripping?

Pym treats her characters with a gentle humor, making even their foibles seem genuinely endearing. While reading "Less Than Angels," I cared what happened to level headed Catherine and flighty Phoebe, two single women in love with the same man. Her characters are people I would like to know. Together we'd drink tea and have a pleasant chat, whiling away a rainy afternoon.

"Less Than Angels" is full of classic Pym characters: the eccentric, Alaric Lydgate, who sits in the evenings with an African mask on and wishes it were permissable to wear it out in public; Rhoda Wellcome and Mabel Swan, sisters, Rhoda given to peering at the neighbors from behind lace curtains; Catherine Oliphant, a writer and spinster, but with a twist she is living, unmarried with; Tom Mallow, one of many anthropologists in the story. Readers of "Excellent Women" will enjoy the reappearance of Esther Clovis and the references to Everard and Mildred Bone. The men in this story have more character development than in previous Pym novels. They are shown to be real people not so different form their feminine counterparts. There is competition in this story, a three-way competition for Tom Mallow's love, and a four-way competition for the Foresight grants, for the study of anthropolgy. The competitions mirror each other in subtle ways. Catherine is one of Pym's most endearing characters. You really yearn for her to find happiness. This is one of my favorites.

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.

I was keen to read something by Barbara Pym, having heard about her for years. Previous reviews on Amazon encouraged me to select this novel. The story of Emma, a single woman in her thirties who retreats to an English country village to write up her anthropological studies, held intellectual, romantic and picturesque promise. What a disappointment I had! Emma's intellectual pursuit is vaguely dismissed in a solitary sentence as 'something to do with attitudes toward almost everything you could think of in one of the new towns.' As for romance, Emma and her suitors, if that is the word, manage nothing beyond a bit of inarticulate, adolescent gaping and groping. And Pym assiduously avoids evoking any sense of rural beauty or natural mystery.

Yes, Pym offers some wry descriptions of her passive characters' glancing collisions during their Brownian motion through life. Some readers may enjoy the irony with which she manipulates references to English literature and stock props of the English countryside (e.g. a spiritless protagonist named after Jane Austen's charming heroine, and dismissive references to the local 'DMV' or 'deserted medieval village'). But the craftsmanship is weak, with chapters beginning and ending for no particular reason; disjointed jumps among disparate points of view within a single paragraph; and plodding reportage of trivial incidents that never stitch together into a coherent design. While the author is at pains to tells us that her characters have interests -- the rector, for example, is described as obsessed with village history -- they display no real passion for anything, let alone for one another. The characters develop all the way from boring to dreary, which puts a rather strict limit on dramatic movement. It was a struggle getting to the end of the book.

This is another review comparing Barbara Pym's books so that readers can choose between them.

A FEW GREEN LEAVES is my favorite. After writing about London settings, Pym returns to the small country village of her beginnings. But, this village lacks the comfortable traditionalism of her earlier SOME TAME GAZELLE. Much of the book dwells on the changes that have come about in the English countryside by 1980.

A FEW GREEN LEAVES is not depressing, however. It is instead humorously realistic about the incongruities between what people have been raised to expect and what actually is. In this sense, it is the most profound of her books because it demonstrates how we can still get the most out of life when only "a few green leaves" remain. This book was written at the end of Pym's life and it contains wisdom and hopefulness as well as, of course, great humor.

"A Few Green Leaves" is one of Barbara Pym's best novels. It is full of characters familiar to readers of Pym's other novels; rectors, widows, spinsters, eccentrics, anthropologists and a cat lady. There is romance, but in true Pym fashion it is not always suitable. It is subtly funny and poignantly sad, often at the same time. The heroine, Emma Howick, is a prototypical Pym spinster, intellectual, unsure and perhaps uninterested in the classic ways to attract a man. She is an anthropologist recently moved to a small village to live in her mother's cottage. I discovered Barbara Pym's work while in college and nothing she has written has ever disappointed me.