The Sweet Dove Died

The most underrated novelist of the century … The subtlest of her books — the sparkle on first acquaintance has been succeeded by the deeper brilliance of established art – Philip Larkin, poet and author of The Whitsun Weddings
[Pym] makes me smile, laugh out loud, consider my own foibles and fantasies and, above all, suffer real regret when I reach the final page. Of how many authors can you honestly say that? – Mavis Cheek, author of Aunt Margaret’s Lover
A splendid, humorous writer – John Betjeman, Poet Laureate 1972-1984
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 seventy-five years … Spectacular * The Sunday Times *
Very funny and keenly observant of the ridiculous as well as the pathetic in humanity * Financial Times *
Beneath the gentle surfaces of [Pym’s] novels is a slow-building comedy, salt wit in a saline drip … Her work offers the reassurance that we are all as bad and as good, as prickly and as resilient, as any Evensong attendee. It is a useful gratification in grating times * The New York Times *
Her characters are all meticulously impaled on the delicate pins of a wit that is as scrupulous as it is deadly * The Observer *

Barbara Pym (1913-1980) was a British novelist best known for her series of satirical novels on English middle-class society. A graduate of St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, Pym published the first of her nine novels, Some Tame Gazelle, in 1950, followed by five more books. Despite this early success and continuing popularity, Pym went unpublished from 1963 to 1977. Her work was rediscovered after a famous article in the Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated Pym as the most underrated writer of the century. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize.

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