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and John
Barnicot, who become the novel's Count Ricardo Bianco and his dead friend John Akenside. Two more women also had real-life counterparts. Edith Liversidge was based on Honor Tracy, once Liddell's love interest, while Lady Clara Boulding has been identified with Lady Julia Pakenham, a daughter
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When Agatha returns, she brings home Dr Grote, the colonial bishop of
Mbawawa, a former protégé of Harriet's during the time when he was a curate. Belinda begins to see in him another threat to her peaceful coexistence with her sister, but it is to herself that the bishop proposes in the end. When he
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interrupted Pym's budding literary career, and she finally revised the novel to the point where it was accepted by Cape in 1950. The novel sold 3,544 copies in Great
Britain by the end of the 1950s, which was not a bestselling figure but was reasonable for a debut novelist. Among alternative titles
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Harmony returns to the disrupted community with the marriage of Mr Donne and Olivia
Berridge and their subsequent departure. As life returns to normal, a new curate arrives to claim Harriet's attention, while Belinda finds "such consolation as she needed in our greater English poets", gardening and
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Hoccleve, with whom she studied then, although he had preferred to marry the better-connected Agatha, a bishop's daughter. Harriet has an admirer in the village, the
Italian Count Ricardo Bianco, who regularly proposes marriage to her, but her preference has always been to look after the welfare of
339:
Besides herself and her sister Hilary, who are the characters
Belinda and Harriet Bede, many others with whom Barbara Pym had associated at Oxford were included, sometimes under revealing names. Henry Harvey, her (and Belinda's) abiding love interest, is transformed into Archdeacon Hoccleve; the
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and a niece of Agatha
Hoccleve. But in the meantime, Agatha leaves for a visit to a German spa and another of Belinda's and the Archdeacon's student acquaintances comes to stay at the vicarage. This is Dr Parnell, now head of the main university library, who is accompanied by his assistant, the
327:
Two months after she had begun work on the first draft in 1934, Barbara Pym noted in her diary that "Some time in July I began writing a story about Hilary and me as spinsters of fiftyish. Henry, Jock and all of us appeared in it." There exists a first edition of its much edited final version
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gave her full scope for a range of private jokes of that kind. The Bede sisters, who gain excitement from so small a village event as the departure of the vicar's wife watched from behind bedroom curtains, are given the same surname as the ecclesiastical historian, The
Venerable
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It has been considered a remarkable first novel, because of the way in which the youthful Pym — who began the book while still a student — imagined herself into the situation of a middle-aged spinster, living with her sister in the country. The poet
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Archdeacon's wife Agatha is identified with, not the woman that Henry eventually married, but Alison West–Watson, a more successful girlfriend than was
Barbara. Three of the characters were based on former librarians at the
219:. Cape expressed interest in Pym's writing, however, and encouraged her to make some alterations to the text and consider re-submitting. Pym's friend, the up-and-coming literary critic
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annotated in the author's hand with a pencilled list identifying the characters based on her friends and associates. A later scholar has therefore drawn the conclusion that originally
348:, nicknamed "Jock" as in the diary entry, who is Dr Nicholas Parnell, the former university friend who comes to stay with the Archdeacon. The other two librarians were Count
301:(Pym) keeps her design so perfectly to scale, and places one mild tint in such happy juxtaposition to another that this reader ... derived considerable pleasure from it.
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now in her fifties who shares a house with her younger, more dominant sister
Harriet, who is also unmarried. Since her university days, Belinda has loved the village's
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At the time the story begins, Mr Donne is the newly arrived curate in the village. Eventually he becomes engaged to Olivia Berridge, an academic specialising in
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and Chaucer to an uncomprehending congregation in his sermons. The humour is further underlined by his wife and her niece both being more erudite students of
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All through her life, Barbara Pym recorded odd names that pleased or amused her – for example, a cathedral organist named A. Surplice. A roman à clef like
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150:, and the work of other English poets is frequently referenced during the course of the story. First started during Pym's period studying at
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socially suspect Mr Mold. Before leaving, Mr Mold proposes marriage to Harriet and, refused, takes it calmly by visiting the local
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too is rejected, he proposes instead to Connie Aspinall, a decayed gentlewoman living in the same village, and is accepted.
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at one time or another, although the library itself is never identified by name in the novel. Principal among them was
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give their names to the librarian Dr Parnell and the dressmaker Miss Prior. Other 18th century literary names include
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Then, in a novel where so much is made of "our greater poets", the characters bear the name of several. The
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Pym's characters sometimes recur in minor roles in later novels. Archdeacon Hoccleve featured in
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A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters (ed. Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym)
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The title of the book is taken from the poem "Something to Love" by
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The novel details episodes in the life of Belinda Bede, a
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called it "an enchanting book about village life" while
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in 1983. In 2012, it was released as an audiobook by
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187:and counting himself well escaped.
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489:Songs, Ballads, and Other Poems
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487:Bayly, Thomas Haynes,
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900:Novels by Barbara Pym
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501:Pym, Barbara (1984).
203:Pym started to write
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355:5th Earl of Longford
236:The Well Tam'd Heart
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792:The Sweet Dove Died
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605:Barbara Pym Society
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199:Publication history
148:Thomas Haynes Bayly
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362:Some Tame Gazelle
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312:Some Tame Gazelle
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