Some Tame Gazelle [Hardcover]

Barbara Pym (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 21, 1983

'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.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Barbara Pym's (1913-1980) first novel, Some Tame Gazelle , was published in 1950, followed by thirteen more books. A writer from the age of sixteen, Barbara Pym has been acclaimed as "the most underrated writer of the century" by the late British poet laureate, Philip Larkin. Her 1977 novel, Quartet in Autumn, was short listed for the Booker Prize. -- Christian Science Monitor --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Barbara Pym, who died on January 11, 1980, spent the last few years of her life in an Oxfordshire village, sharing a small cottage with her sister. In 1977, after sixteen years in the wilderness she published QUARTET IN AUTUMN. It was treated as a major literary event, as was her next novel, THE SWEET DOVE DIED. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 252 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult (July 21, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525241787
• ISBN-13: 978-0525241782
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #645,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Miss Pym's most enjoyable, June 23, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Some Tame Gazelle (Paperback)

Although it was not her first novel to be published, this was one of Barbara Pym's earliest endeavors. I read in A Very Private Eye (a collection of Miss Pym's letters and journals) that she started writing it in her early 20's, basing the main characters on herself, her sister, the man she was in love with at Oxford, and other friends. However, she aged them all considerably, making them 50-ish years old. I think she may have worked on the book again later, so I don't think it's actually the work of a 22-year old. Miss Pym appears as Belinda Bede and her sister as Harriet. In the story, they are two spinsters living together in a small village. Interestingly, later in life Barbara Pym and her sister did live together. The character of their clergyman, a married Archdeacon, is based on a man sharing the same first name (Henry) whom Barbara Pym was devoted to in college. He subsequently broke her heart by marrying another woman. The fictional Henry, too, is married, but has been so for 25 years. Belinda/Barbara is still devoted to him, but with warm affection instead of burning passion. It's hard to explain the appeal of this book. It has humor; Barbara Pym saw the funny side of ordinary happenings and people. And it has pathos, which is a crucial ingredient of the best humor. There is even a touch of feminism, although gentle. For example, when Henry remarks to Belinda that women "enjoy" being martyrs, she repies that they may martyr themselve, but they leave the enjoyment of it to the men. Like Jane Austen, Barbara Pym limits herself to "a few families in a village," and like Jane Austen she succeeds in providing insight, irony, and, withal, enjoyment and optimism.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Touching and funny, April 22, 2001

By 

P. A. Hogan (Providence RI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Some Tame Gazelle (Paperback)

In the early chapters of "Some Tame Gazelles" we are taken on a "Pym moments" romp through the day-to-day lives of the spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede. Timid, sentimental Belinda (one of Pym's "Excellent Women")elder of the two, a faithful church worker, has loved the peevish, married Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve ("dear Henry") for over 30 years. Belinda quotes 18th Century poets, wears "sensible" shoes and longs for "some sympathetic person to whom she could say that Dr. Johnson had been so right when he had said that all change is of itself an evil." Plump ("attractive in a fat Teutonic way"),jolly and style-conscious Harriet, in her middle fifties, has a fondness for young curates to whom she serves boiled chicken suppers and makes presents of hand-knitted socks and home-made jellies. We meet: The Reverend Edgar Donne, the latest in a long line of young curates fussed over by Harriet; Edith Liversidge ("a kind of decayed gentlewoman"), the disheveled, blunt-speaking neighbor with an interest in sanitation arrangements; the dreary, snobbish Connie Aspinall, who basks in the memory of her glory days when she was companion to Lady Grudge of Belgrave Square ("a kind of relation of one of Queen Alexandra's Ladies-in-Waiting"); Miss Prior, the touchy sewing woman, in a tender and humorous episode involving cauliflower cheese; the melancholy Count Ricardo Bianco, who on a regular basis offers proposals of marriage to Harriet. There is Archdeacon Hoccleve, the object of Belinda's devotion ("her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning"), whose standoffish behavior and proclivity for choosing unsuitable prayers and for preaching obscure literary sermons no one understands win him little favor among the people in his parish. And there are more matchless Pym characters set against a quintessential Pym story, touching and funny and quite wonderful.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny--But There's That Mean Streak, February 1, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Some Tame Gazelle (Paperback)

Barbara Pym is a brilliant writer. I, of course, am not the only one who thinks so, or we might never have seen half of the work she eventually published. After writing and publishing 5 novels, with both critical and commercial success, Pym found her 6th novel rejected by her publisher, and by every other publisher she submitted it to. The 60s had arrived, and the sharply pointed humor of Barbara Pym was no longer in fashion. In spite of the rejections, Pym continued to write for 17 more years with what appeared to be no hope of sharing her writing. Luckily, as with most Pym stories, a bittersweet ending allowed the world to have another half dozen Pym novels in print to delight in. SOME TAME GAZELLE, the second novel she wrote (the first was very much juvenilia) and the first she published (following two separate rounds of editing during the next 12 years), is her funniest. Casting her eye to the future, she wrote about her Oxford friends, and about herself and her sister, Hilary, in middle age. Full of inside jokes, the novel's tongue-in-cheek tone sparkles throughout. Pym is a brilliant writer because her sentences are gems. She is funny because of WHAT she says and HOW she says it. And, finally, she is MEAN in the most pleasurable possible way. Pick up any novel by Pym and delight in her. You will be well rewarded.