This is the first Barbara Pym I have read and I have to say I was a bit put off at first. It was written and set around the 1950's in London about Dulcie Mainwairing -a 30-odd year old woman and Aylwin Forbes a 47-year-old man. It is quite odd, no very odd. In many ways. There are a cast of extras in it, Laurel, Dulcie's niece; Viola, a rather cynical woman Dulcie meets who boards with her; Mrs Williton, an aunt, an uncle, two highly eccentric neighbours and a very strange bed and Breakfast owner who is Aylwin's mother. They seem to rattle around in this story which is mostly about Dulcie's gentle obsession with Aylwin. She has clearly fallen in love and does all the strange things one does when you fall in love - she looks him up in books, finds out where his brother is, visits his mother's boarding house, and this book is mostly about that obsession - but in the end all these characters floating around seem to tie up their loose ends or become important to the story. More important, and what I really began to enjoy about Pym was the way she tied up different motifs in the plot which were seen from different characters points of view. A stone squirrel in a front yard, a stuffed eagle in the boarding house. At one stage we see Aylwin unpacking, he has bought nothing intellectual to read, just Henry James - later downstairs Dulcie overhears him and wonders to her self why he is talking so Henry Jamesian. Its just a nice overlay of images from different viewpoints and it starts you realising how much in common Dulcie and Aylwin have.

Like I said, I was a bit put off at first, but its a lovely, gentle, clever little romance that fairly soon I was really enjoying it.

the tale of dulcie mainwearing and her adventures with a number of academic types. barbara pym wrote with a sharp eye for the eccentricities of her characters. but she did not make any of her characters black and white stick figures. read it and laugh!

I was the only member of my book club who liked this. I felt it was an interesting book if for no other reason than the illustration that sometimes what DOESN'T happen is as important as what DOES. The tale of four lonely people who no one in the world. They can't recall how they got here and seem to not know where to go from here. A thought-provoking book. Many in the group found this depressing, and it could be. However, still worth a look.

...society in the late 1970's in London. The "quartet" is four older middle-class, working people, two women and two men around the age of sixty. They face the challenge of being without spouses or truly close relatives other than each other. Pym writes of the tragic circumstances of being condescended to by well-meaning, irritating young social workers who only seem to alienate these pensioners. Though the loneliness is obvious; its solution isn't sloppily described with a simple, conventional ending. I couldn't put it down.

I am now reading Quartet in Autumn for the third time; this time in Portuguese. Years after her death the authoress is slowly being "discovered" and praised. In fact, she was voted as the greatest unsung or unknown author by a gamut of renown writers.

The story details the lives of four lonely adults as they reach the autumn of their lives. It is not all sadness and daily drudery; Pym abundantly sprinkles dry, subtle humor throughout the novel like little gems waiting to be found.

Pym is an outstanding writer. I often encourage others to read her works. However, admittedly, Pym is not for everyone. I, and many others, happen to cherish her writings. Give her a try. Start with Quartet in Autumn. I look forward to reading other reviews.

I thoroughly enjoyed Pym's Excellent Women and Quartet In Autumn. However, I was just unable to find anything humorous about a middle-aged college professor's foolish seduction attempts with a young, female student of his. It's not funny, it's pathetic and banal. Why is thirty-six year Jessie portrayed as an over-the-hill old maid yet the handsome curate of precisely the same age ends up with a nineteen year old, youngest daughter of Lord Somebody at the end of the story? It's an old-fashioned plot that hasn't stood the test of time. I thought the curate's matrimonial choice demonstrated shallow regard for money, youth and beauty. It became too much, the clash between gossiping, nasty-minded old women versus the horny old men striving to demonstrate their virility. Did my mother-in-law write this? The attitudes expressed in this tedious tale had none of the sincere wit of Jane Austen and none of her sympathetic characterizations. Was I supposed to identify with Jessie? She was the only character with any indication of a thoughtful, sensitive introspection yet she ended in the same dreary spot, still in a position of humiliation, on a bleak day, as part of the furniture.

Though always insightful and just stunningly human, Barbara Pym's novels do tend to blur into one another, fraught as they are, with spinsters and vicars who take tea on rainy days and wonder about what is "suitable." But this one stands out.

Oh sure, there's a vicar and a tender young curate and a couple of spinsters and lots of tea and a few unsuitable dresses, comments, situations, and even romances; but in this, Barbara Pym's first novel, the characters are funnier, and the farce is one shade broader.

Think of this as the BEST one. That will help you sort it out.

"Crampton Hodnet," a novel of Oxford, entertains and amuses in a way few books do. Miss Doggett, the upright spinster who entertains hapless Oxford youths at tea parties in her dark North Oxford home; Jessie Morrow, her companion (who reappears later in "Jane and Prudence"); their curate lodger, the vicar and his wife, Miss Doggett's cousin, the academic Francis Cleveland, his vague but charming wife Margaret, Francis's brilliant student, Barbara Bird, and many others enrich the cast of an enchanting novel The plot is more vigorous than in some of Pym's later works, and one laughs from beginning to end. Treat yourself some rainy afternoon.

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.

I have read all of Barbara Pym's published works and I find that this is one of her weaker offerings. In this book she leaves her spinsters and has a married woman with a child for her heroine. She doesn't seem comfortable with this heroine. The scenes with the child are a little stilted. She doesn't seem as real or as interesting as Mildred of "Excellent Women" or even Wilmet of "A Glass of Blessings" her other married heroine. But, as a fan I enjoyed the book. It was interesting to see her outside her usual cast of characters. There are some really good parts, especially those dealing with the academics where she is on familiar ground.