The Sweet Dove Died
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Originally published in 1978, The Sweet Dove Died is a darkly comic novel about the sometimes fickle nature of love and relationships, from the author of Quartet in Autumn, Barbara Pym.
He is going to kiss me, Leonora thought in sudden panic, pray heaven no more than that... One couldn't lose one's dignity, of course, Leonora told herself, for after all one wasn't exactly a young girl. Surely freedom from this sort of thing was among the compensations of advancing age and the sad decay of one's beauty; one really ought not to be having to fend people off any more.
A chance encounter over a Victorian flower book brings together Humphrey, a widowed antiques dealer, his handsome nephew James, and the lovely but cold Leonora. Although she is considerably older, Leonora develops a fondness for James all the while knowing Humphrey has feelings for her. Determined to keep James in her thrall, Leonora must contend with the bookish Phoebe. Then Ned, a young American, appears on the scene.
A work of comic genius about the sometimes fickle nature of love and relationships, The Sweet Dove Died is one of Barbara Pym's finest.
About this Author
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 Despite this early success and continuing popularity, Pym went unpublished from 1963 to 1977.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 in 1977.
Reviews
"Faultless." The Guardian
"Her characters are all meticulously impaled on the delicate pins of a wit that is as scrupulous as it is deadly." The Observer
"A coldly funny book." The Sunday Telegraph
"Highly distinctive...The critics who have recently insisted on Miss Pym's too long neglected gifts have not been wrong." Financial Times
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