The Sweet Dove Died [Paperback]

An acidly funny novel about a woman who falls for a much younger man by one of Britain's great writers of social comedy, now back in print.

A lesser-known, darker sister to Barbara Pym's Excellent Women.

The Sweet Dove Died is one of Barbara Pym's last novels, in which her work took on a new, keen edge. It is about 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. Pym’s sharp eye for comedy and shrewd observation of English manners are on full display in this finely wrought novel of love, loss, and all the hopes and disappointments that befall the human heart.“Faultless.” —The Guardian

“Byrne [Pym's biographer] wisely judges Pym’s masterpiece to be not Excellent Women, the conventional choice, but The Sweet Dove Died . . . A fearless novel.” —Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker

As with Pym’s other novels, The Sweet Dove Died renders with wry humor the foibles and contradictions of a culture of manners—the art of the polite insult, the ludicrous arbitrariness of custom . . . While it’s never been the most popular of Pym’s works, The l£Ø