The Sweet Dove Died [Paperback]

Barbara Pym (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Harper; First Printing edition (1987)
• ASIN: B002OD7ZQI
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best novels I've ever read., February 10, 2003

By 

I. Sondel "I. Sondel - lover of the arts" (Tallahassee, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sweet Dove Died (Paperback)

I happened upon this slim volume by accident the other day - and what a happy accident it turned out to be. Barbara Pym's "The Sweet Dove Died" is a novel of unrequited love - an unnatural love of an older woman for a much younger gay man. There are shades of the Tennessee Williams classic "The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone," yet the writing style is more akin to Patrick Gale's early works "The Aerodynamics of Pork" and "Kansas in August."
Pym's novels are what used to be called "comedies of manners." Her work is immediately engaging, always amusing, and quite pointed in its depiction of a woman so consumed with the appearence of perfection that she misses every opportunity for happiness.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Newly hooked on Barbara Pym, May 8, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Sweet Dove Died (Paperback)

This was the second Barbara Pym book I have ever read and it confirmed to me that she is greatly underrated as a writer. Though not perhaps as brilliantly comic as Excellent Women, Sweet Dove Died is gently satirical in the most delicious way. The type of woman she deals with is, this time, the affected 'lady of a certain age', rather than the humble and worthy types. One could almost imagine that this is how Madame Bovary may have turned out, had she had lived a city life. There is nothing prudish about Pym and readers today may be struck by how 'modern' she still appears, particularly in her depiction of the younger male characters in this novel. Greatly enjoyable.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The pleasures of possession, June 27, 2007

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Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sweet Dove Died (Paperback)

Written during her "wilderness years" between the early 1960s and her critical rediscovery in 1978, THE SWEET DOVE DIED is one of Barbara Pym's darkest novels but also one of her finest. The fortyish protagonist, Leonora Eyre, is wealthy, elegant, and beautiful; she is also unmarried and idle, and fills her days doing little other than attending to her own minor pleasures, primarily acquiring Victoriana. At an auction she meets Humphrey, an antique dealer, and his nephew James, whom is young, single, handsome, and very impressionable. Leonora schemes to make James another of her acquisitions, while the sixtyish Humphrey makes plans of his own concerning Leonora; complicating matters even further are the dowdy Phoebe, who also longs for James, and the malicious young American literature professor Ned.

This novel returns Pym to her concern with the relations between unmarried straight women and men of alternative sexualities, first explored in her A GLASSFUL OF BLESSINGS; it is, I think, an even finer work than that previous novel, and casts a much colder eye towards its subject. Almost all the characters are petty, spiteful, snobbish and materialistic: Leonora is the worst among them (with the exception of Ned), but Pym's achievement is to make her readers care about her protagonist despite her selfishness and her self-deludedness. In its own way this book is something of a minor masterpiece; it brings off its story absolutely perfectly.