The Sweet Dove Died - Barbara Pym

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The Sweet Dove Died

by
Barbara Pym

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Title:	The Sweet Dove Died
Author:	Barbara Pym
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1978
Length:	210 pages
Availability:	The Sweet Dove Died - US
	The Sweet Dove Died - UK
	The Sweet Dove Died - Canada
	La douce colombe est morte - France
	Das Täubchen - Deutschland
	Se una dolce colomba - Italia
	Murió la dulce paloma - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

With an Introduction by Susie Boyt

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Our Assessment:

B+ : very nicely done

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Sunday Times	.	16/7/1978	Peter Ackroyd
The Times	.	6/7/1978	Philip Howard

From the Reviews:

"Even though this novel is set somewhere in the Seventies, its world is solidly bourgeois. The characters can be more easily identified by their possessions than by their behaviour, their social and economic relations so securely visible that the fortunate novelist can concentrate on more ethereal arid important matters (.....) (H)omosexuality in this novel is like a peculiarly fruity after-shave: sensed, but never discussed (.....) The result is to embalm characters in their social circumstances so successfully that they become practically immobile -- only the combustible forces of coincidence and melodrama can propel them into action, but in the process The Sweet Dove Died turns into conventional romance." - Peter Ackroyd, Sunday Times

"Barbara Pym's deceptively simple little novel. (...) The book is sharp, funny, and sad in its bitchy observations of these people living and partly living their lives of quiet desperation." - Philip Howard, The Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

The Sweet Dove Died opens with Leonora Eyre making the acquaintance of Humphrey Boyce, an antiques dealer, and his twenty-four-year-old nephew James, who works for him after completing "an undistinguished career" at Oxford.
Leonora is approaching fifty, and:

Leonora had had romantic experiences in practically all the famous gardens of Europe, beginning with the Grosser Garten in Dresden where, as a schoolgirl before the war, she had been picked up by a White Russian prince. And yet nothing had come of all these pickings-up; she had remained unmarried, one could almost say untouched.

The age-appropriate Humphrey -- nearing sixty -- is attracted to Leonora, but Leonora is more taken and drawn to the youngster. Humphrey holds out hope -- "Humphrey flattered himself, she would become bored with the novelty of James's youth and realize the more lasting qualities" --, showing that he doesn't really get Leonora. As to James:

He was attracted to her in the way that a young man may sometimes be to a woman old enough to be his mother.

Perhaps all the more so since his own mother had recently died .....
Leonora is set in her somewhat old-fashioned ways, with certain standards and style; so also, for example. she: "liked things to be flawless, expected them to be". She lives a life of leisure: "You mean you do nothing?" one woman says shockedly, to which Leonora responds: "One lives one's own life;, and that's exactly what she does, even if it means having no truly close connections. There are people in her life, but:

She would not have counted the friends she still had, like Humphrey and the elderly admirers who took her out to expensive meals, nor yet her women friends and acquaintances. One would almost rather not have had them at all.

But she sees James as a perfect fit for the kind of person she wants in her life, a not-quite-romantic partner, a kind of boy-toy she can devote herself to, and who is entirely devoted to her. She has expectations for the relationship, and tries to shape and direct it; she believes she can 'arrange' James, just as she can "arrange and adapt [...] to her satisfaction" the pesky other figures who threaten to take his attentions away from her. Unfortunately, the vacuous and rather dull James is easily led astray, still figuring things out -- not least whether it's women or men that he'd rather be sexually involved with.
James is more adrift than oblivious; even he recognizes that:

Sometimes it seemed almost as if she had created him herself -- the beautiful young man with whom people were always falling in love and who yet remained inexplicably and deeply devoted to her, a woman so much older than he was. James had been content to play this part and of course there was no doubt of his devotion to Leonora.

       First, James has a half-hearted kind of affair with the more age-appropriate Phoebe (last seen then headed for Majorca, "to write a novel or something"). Leonora feels she manages to 'vanquish' her -- but meanwhile James, traveling abroad on an extended tour, hooks up with the smooth-talking, carefree American Ned, who is set to spend a year in England. Leonora at least has enough sense that she: "knew instinctively that Ned was far more of a danger than Phoebe could ever have been".
       For a while, Leonora manages to cling onto James, installing him in her house. It's just what she wants -- a pet, in human form -- but even James can't settle for that -- as is also nicely summed up in the Keats lines that give the novel the title, which also feature in the novel's epigraph and are, eventually, cruelly recited by Ned to Leonora.
       James does enjoy Leonora's attentions much of the time; if he's honest with himself, he has to admit that he: "was much more at ease with her than Phoebe or even Ned", but it's not really a relationship with much of a future for the youngster, so he at least bridles some at it. He is a dull little prize, too -- even Ned winds up tiring of him and how little there is to him and dumps him -- though presumably that is part of the appeal to Leonora, that she can shape him to her expectations. (James is not entirely an empty vessel, but pretty darn close; amusingly, one of the extravagant purchases Pym has Leonora make for him is a pair of vases he had admired (only then, rather typically, to find: "now that he saw the vases again he felt that perhaps after all he didn’t like them as much as he had remembered").)
       Fumbling Ned and rigid Leonora (and poor Humphrey, hopelessly biding his time) are very well presented, especially also in their interaction with others. There's a melancholy cast to it all, but also quite a bit of humor -- not least in the figures of Phoebe and craftily manipulative Ned, much brighter than James.
       The Sweet Dove Died is also a nice, strange mix of old-fashioned times and attitudes and the new era-- with James at one point finding: "his imaginings were old-fashioned and ridiculous like a novel of the thirties" (while Leonora was part of: "that generation which had grown up in the late thirties, still expecting and seeking -- though rarely finding -- the phenomenon of ‘romantic love’" ...). It's all a bit ridiculous, too, but in charming and amusing fashion, with Pym's writing a delight, making for an enjoyable if melancholy-tinged read.

- M.A.Orthofer, 8 October 2025

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Links:

The Sweet Dove Died:

New York Review Books publicity page
Christian Bourgois Éditeur publicity page
Astoria publicity page
Gatopardo Ediciones publicity page

Reviews:

Barbara Pym:

The Barbara Pym Society

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Contemporary British fiction
Other books from New York Review Books

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About the Author:

English author Barbara Pym lived 1913 to 1980.

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