“The Sweet Dove Died” by Barbara Pym

The Sweet Dove Died, the most brilliant and incisive of Barbara Pym’s novels, depicts a woman’s attachment to a man much younger than herself. Beautiful and self-absorbed, Leonora Eyre has a passion for collecting Victorian objects and is coolly indifferent towards everything outside of her fastidious, elegant existence. When she is courted by Humphrey, a widowed antiques dealer, she disdains his advances, preferring rather the attentions of his twenty-four-year-old nephew James.

Leonora’s possession of James is challenged, however, first by Phoebe, a bookish young woman his own age, and then by the suave and seductive Ned, a visiting American professor with whom James quickly becomes infatuated. Barbara Pym’s sharp eye for comedy and shrewd observation of English middle-class manners are on full display in this finely wrought novel of love, loss, and all the hopes and disappointments that befall the human heart.