The Sweet Dove Died

The Sweet Dove Died

Title: The Sweet Dove Died
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.

More Books from Barbara Pym & Susie Boyt

Barbara Pym & A. N. Wilson
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym & Sabine Roth
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym & Susie Boyt
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym & Sabine Roth
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym & Sabine Roth