The Sweet Dove Died: A Strong, Sad Book

 So – The Sweet Dove Died, the Barbara Pym novel to which I turned after the harrowing experience of reading The Blood of the Lamb. The Sweet Dove Died was written in the Sixties, when Pym's star had sunk far below the horizon of fashionable taste, was rejected by 21 publishers in all (even when she sent it in under a male name), and finally published in 1978, after the great Pym revival occasioned by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both naming her, in a TLS feature, as the most underrated novelist of the century. 
  The version of the novel published in 1978 differed from its original form, partly in response to Larkin's helpful suggestions: 'With fewer characters and slower movement,' he advised, 'it could be a strong, sad book.' And a strong, sad book it is, also one with rather few characters (and not many pages: it comes in at a bit over 180). The central character is Leonora Eyre, an elegant and attractive middle-aged woman who is taken up by Humphrey Boyce, a pompous upmarket antique dealer, and his ineffectual but personable nephew James, a young man of ambiguous sexuality who has lost both his parents and been, in effect, adopted by Humphrey: 'There was something about the idea of an orphan that brought out the best in Humphrey, that desire to do good without too much personal inconvenience that lurks in most of us.'       Leonora is only too happy to be taken up by Humphrey and James, the former offering a convenient and conventional relationship (though the fastidious Leonora flinches from the prospect of sex with him), the latter something more emotionally satisfying and flattering to her self-image. Between Humphrey's assiduous wooing and James's undemanding adoration, Leonora is in just the kind of situation she likes, with a little world spinning devotedly around her. She is, as we gradually discover, self-centred and self-serving to a quite alarming degree, happy to behave ruthlessly in her own interests, while all the time convinced she is doing absolutely the right thing: whatever serves to keep her little world spinning to her satisfaction can only be the right thing, surely. 
  However, the cosy Humphrey-Leonora-James triangle comes under threat from outside, in the shape of the dangerously amoral Ned, an American whom James meets on his travels. On Leonora's first meeting with him, she feels an instant, cool antagonism, which turns to something more troubling when Ned pointedly quotes to her the seemingly innocuous little poem by Keats from which Pym's novel takes its title: 'I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving...' Ned goes on, 'his voice lingering over the words and giving them a curious emphasis. "O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied/With a single thread of my own hand's weaving."' Leonora is right to sense danger...
  The Sweet Dove Died darkens towards the end, and has little of the high comedy of her earlier works, but it has real depth, is full of acute observation, and, with its strongly drawn characters and tight, well managed plot, it makes for a richly satisfying read. I'd rate it very high among Pym's novels. And to think – if it hadn't been for Larkin and Cecil, we'd never have heard of it.