Barbara Pym (1913-1980) was born in Shropshire and educated at Oxford. After serving in the censorship office and the Women's Royal Navy Service during World War II, she worked at the International African Institute in London and served as an editor of the journal Africa until her retirement in 1974. She wrote her first novel, Some Time Gazelle, in the 1930s. It took many years to find a publisher. Five more novels appeared in the fifties and early sixties, and then, though she never stopped writing, sixteen years passed before the publication of her late masterpieces, Quartet in Autumn, The Sweet Dove Died, and A Few Green Leaves (published posthumously).

Susie Boyt is the author of seven novels and the memoir My Judy Garland Life, which was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize, staged at the Nottingham Playhouse, and serialized on BBC Radio 4. She has written about art, life, and fashion for the Financial Times for many years and recently edited The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories by Henry James.

"Faultless." --The Guardian

"Byrne [Pym's biographer] wisely judges Pym's masterpiece to be not Excellent Women, the conventional choice, but The Sweet Dove Died . . . A fearless novel." --Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker

"Her characters are all meticulously impaled on the delicate pins of a wit that is as scrupulous as it is deadly." --The Observer

"A coldly funny book." --The Telegraph

"Highly distinctive.... [T]he critics who have recently insisted on Miss Pym's too long neglected gifts have not been wrong." --The Financial Times

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Pub date: 2025-09-16

Length: 240 pages