Barbara Pym Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Some Tame Gazelle (1950)
  2. Excellent Women (1952)
  3. Jane and Prudence (1953)
  4. Less Than Angels (1955)
  5. A Glass of Blessings (1958)
  6. No Fond Return of Love (1961)
  7. Quartet in Autumn (1977)
  8. The Sweet Dove Died (1978)
  9. A Few Green Leaves (1980)
  10. An Unsuitable Attachment (1982)
  11. Crampton Hodnet (1985)
  12. An Academic Question (1986)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Civil to Strangers and Other Writings (1988)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. A Very Private Eye (1984)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Barbara Pym Books Overview

Some Tame Gazelle

‘It was odd that Harriet should always have been so fond of curates. They were so immature and always made the same kind of conversation. Now the Archdeacon was altogether different…
‘Together yet alone, the Misses Bede occupy the central crossroads of parish life. Harriet, plump, elegant and jolly, likes nothing better than to make a fuss of new curates, secure in the knowledge that elderly Italian Count Ricardo Bianco will propose to her yet again this year. Belinda, meanwhile has harboured sober feelings of devotion towards Archdeacon Hochleve for thirty years. Then into their quiet, comfortable lives comes a famous librarian, Nathaniel Mold, and a bishop from Africa, Theodore Grote who each take to calling on the sisters for rather more unsettling reasons.

Excellent Women

Excellent Women is one of Barbara Pym’s richest and most amusing high comedies. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman s daughter and a mild mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those ‘Excellent Women,’ the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.

Jane and Prudence

Middle aged Jane is the well intentioned but far from perfect clergyman’s wife and mother. Prudence, who at 29 is teetering at the edge of spinsterhood, is an attractive, educated working girl. The two best friends share memories of their carefree days at Oxford, leisurely lunches, and gossip, but their ultimate goal is to find a suitable mate for Prudence.

Less Than Angels

It is surely appropriate that anthropologists, who spend their time studying life and behavior in various societies, should be studied in their turn,’ says Barbara Pym. In a wonderful twist on her subjects, she has written a book inspecting the behavior of a group of anthropologists. She pits them against each other in affairs of the heart and mind. Academia is an especially rich backdrop. There is competition between the sexes, gender, and age groups. With Pym’s keen eye for male pretensions and female susceptibilities, she exploits with good humor. Love will have its way even among the learned, one of whom is in a quandary between an adult and a young student. This is the world of research, grants, libraries and primitive cultures. Here is a particularly interesting contrast between the tribes of Africa and the social matrix of London. As the title implies, civilized society fares not too well on moral grounds to the more primitive societies. Barbara Pym does a masterful job with the mores of the cloistered society of academia.

A Glass of Blessings

Well dressed and looked after, Wilmet, the novel’s hero*ine, is married to Rodney, a handsome army major, who works 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 a cast of characters, including three priests. Set in 1950s London, this witty novel is told through the narration of the shallow and self absorbed protagonist who, despite her flaws, begins to learn something about love and about herself. Through Wilmet’s superficial monologues readers are exposed to Barbara Pym’s clever commentary on class, the church, and her engaging characterizations. Readers will become captivated, as is Wilmet, with the lives and personalities of characters such as the kleptomaniac Wilf Bason, the priests Keith, and Piers Longridge. She fancies herself in love with Piers, the brother of a close friend, and imagines he is her secret admirer the admirer is in fact her friend’s husband. Wilmet fails to realise that Piers is gay until she becomes aware of his relationship with Keith, a young man she regards as rather common.

No Fond Return of Love

Dulcie Mainwaring, the hero*ine of the book, is one of those ‘excellent women’ who is always helping others and never looking out for herself especially in the realms of love. The novel has a delicate tangle of schemes and unfulfilled dreams, hidden secrets and a castle or two. Told wonderfully in the deadpan honesty that has become a Pym hallmark, this book is a delight.

Quartet in Autumn

This is the story of four people in late middle age Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia whose chief point of contact is that they work in the same office and they suffer the same problem loneliness. Lovingly, poignantly, satirically and with much humour, Pym conducts us through their small lives and the facade they erect to defend themselves against the outside world. There is nevertheless an obstinate optimism in her characters, allowing them in their different ways to win through to a kind of hope. Barbara Pym’s sensitive wit and artistry are at their most sparkling in ‘Quartet in Autumn‘. ‘An exquisite, even magnificent work of art’ ‘Observer’. ‘Barbara Pym has a sharp eye for the exact nuances of social behaviour’ ‘The Times’. ‘The wit and style of a twentieth century Jane Austen’ ‘Harpers & Queen’. ‘Barbara Pym’s unpretentious, subtle, accomplished novels are for me the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past 75 years…
spectacular’ ‘Sunday Times’. ‘Very funny and keenly observant of the ridiculous as well as the pathetic in humanity’ ‘Financial Times’.

The Sweet Dove Died

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’.

A Few Green Leaves

Completed barely two months before her death, Pym’s last novel is an incisive and wry portrait of life in an English village in Oxfordshire. It is also certain to be considered by many her masterwork. In A Few Green Leaves the author combines the rural setting of her earliest novels with many of the themes and even some 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 1920’s is juxtaposed against the banalities of life in today’s world.

An Unsuitable Attachment

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.’

Crampton Hodnet

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.

Civil to Strangers and Other Writings

This novel originally called Adam and Cassandra was written in 1936 about the time of SOME TAME GAZELLE, when Pym was in her 20’s. CIVIL TO STRANGERS takes place in small Shropshire village. The charm of Budapest and a Hungarian by the name of Stefan Tilos find there way into this quiet novel. The people of the Shropshire village are forever changed by his influence.

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