Dispassionate to the point of discomfort, "Quartet In Autumn" is filled with strong insights unburdened by empathy. "Quartet in Autumn" follows the changing lives of four people who have worked in the same office for some years and who are now approaching retirement. The quartet is made up of t...
In terms of tone, this novel is somewhere between the two Pym works I've previously read: it has much of the lighthearted banter and witty observation of Excellent Women, but also a melancholy air akin to Quartet in Autumn. The "unsuitable attachment" of the title is supposed to be that of John an...
An Unsuitable Attachment was Barbara Pym's seventh book -- a number that should prove ominous, as this would turn out to be the book which publishers rejected on the grounds that it was (allegedly) "unpublishable". Various reasons for this were advanced; apparently Pym was told initially that it ju...
Wow. What a depressing read -- particularly so, the first half of the book (or thereabouts). We're meeting four main characters who thoroughly seem to be passengers, not drivers of their own lives, in a trajectory from nowhere to nowhere (and not necessarily a different part of nowhere, either) --...
I think that if this had been the first Pym book I'd read, I would have had a very different perception of her style and thought process. Not better or worse, just very different. In a sense, this does feel like a successor to Excellent Women. In another time, Letty and Marcia might have been two ...
I don't think that I can talk about this book without revealing a major plot point, so if you are planning on reading, skip this review! This book had a very different tone from our first Pymalong, Excellent Women. Where Excellent Women was rueful, A Quartet in Autumn was somber. I still liked it,...
I'm so glad I decided to take a few days to re-read this novel after listening to the audio book version. My mind tends to wander when I listen to books, and I had missed some great details. I liked this even more the second time around, and I liked Mildred even more because she's such a well-writ...
A tale of gentlefolk in early 1950s London In "Excellent Women" Barbara Pym lets us see London, immediately after World War Two, through the eyes of Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman's daughter of modest independent means, who works mornings in a charity for aiding impoverished gentlewomen, is active ...
This book was an absolute revelation for me, introducing me to an author I was unfamiliar with. Now I have several print editions of her novels on their way to me, including a paperback omnibus that includes Excellent Women, since audiobooks of novels never really do it for me (I love going back and...
I'm not entirely sure what I just read. It's beautifully written, but I'd be hard pressed to outline its plot. Beyond being a social commentary on single women in the 1950's, with a sidebar on the changing morays of post-war Britain, there's not a lot happening. Mildred is a 30-something spinste...
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