Title | : | The Sweet Dove Died |
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Author | : | Barbara Pym & Susie Boyt |
Release | : | 2025-09-09 |
Kind | : | ebook |
Genre | : | Fiction & Literature, Books |
Size | : |
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, 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. |