Some Tame Gazelle (1950)

A book in the glorious British tradition of gentle village comedy inhabited by the full range of spinsters, clergymen and a melancholic, romantic count. ( )

This isn't my favorite of Barbara Pym's books, but it still gave me a lot to think about. (Possible spoilers, but this isn't a suspense novel!) Two spinster sisters live in an English village. My memory of most of Pym's books is that the protagonists tend to be Anglo-Catholic, but these sisters are firmly low church. Belinda nurses a long, unrequited love for their vicar, an Archdeacon, whom she has known since student days. (He is married to another.) Harriet expends a great deal of emotional and practical energy on whoever happens to be the curate in residence. A few things happen during the course of the novel. Belinda comes to realize that everyone needs someone or something to love. This was the first of Pym's novels. ( )

LibrayThing’s Virago Group is reading twelve of Barbara Pym’s mid-twentieth century novels to celebrate the centenary of her birth. This happens to be the only Pym that I’ve already read, and I enjoyed it just as much this time around.

This was originally recommended by a reader after I reviewed Miss Read’s charming journals of English country life in the 1950s.

Also set in an English country village and in the same time period, the style is more reminiscent of Jane Austen than Miss Read. Some Tame Gazelle, first published in Britain nearly 50 years ago, was the first of Pym’s nine novels.

Barbara Pym is a master at capturing the subtle mayhem that takes place in the apparent quiet of the English countryside. Fifty-something sisters Harriet and Belinda Bede live a comfortable, settled existence. Belinda, the quieter of the pair, has for years been secretly in love with the town’s pompous (and married) archdeacon, whose odd sermons leave members of his flock in muddled confusion. Harriet, meanwhile, a bubbly extrovert, fends off proposal after proposal of marriage. The arrival of Mr. Mold and Bishop Grote disturb the peace of the village and leave the sisters wondering if they’ll ever return to the order of their daily routines.

Nearly every sentence is a sly poke at upper middle class sensibilities in rural English villages. I very much enjoyed this! Four stars for its wry humour.

Read this if: you’re a fan of gentle English humour. 4 stars ( )

In this first novel by a 22 year old Barbara Pym, we can see the shape of things to come in her writing. She places two middle-aged spinsters in a quiet English village, with hearth and pew at the centre of things, giving us a glimpse of their quiet yet often funny lives.

This first book was a bit of play. She took her friends, her sister and herself, and wrote them into a novel, imagining them thirty years down the road. Bright and young, with everything ahead of them (including the Second World War), she played with how they might end up, no doubt poking fun at personality traits and foibles. If nothing else, it was a delightful exercise in creativity but there is a skill here, an acute ability to observe and extrapolate which shows us the novelist she will become.

Harriet, the extrovert, and Belinda, the introvert, lead lives which might look as dull as dishwater from the outside: faithful involvement in their church, knitting, reading poetry and the classics or the gossip rags about the gentry/nobility, gardening, the making, eating and sharing of meals, concerns about what to wear, etc. But the young Pym infuses these with gentle humour and warmth. Dead flowers making the water smell foul in a vase, a caterpillar cooked and served in cauliflower cheese, combinations showing below a pant cuff, socks knit too short, corsets being mended and stuffed under a couch cushion when visitors arrive–all the stuff of ordinary life but captured in still-life snapshots which charm.

This was a time of transition for women in England, this time between the wars. Many young men had been lost in WWI so there were many widows and many women who would never have the chance to marry. But for women of independent means, like Harriet and Belinda, it was also a time of liberating choice when they could elect to remain independent, living the lives they preferred. And, despite Harriet’s flirtations, prefer it they did. Unsuitable suitors are rejected. The marriages of others are observed with a faint sense of relief. Even Belinda, with her long-held schwarm for Archdeacon Hoccleve, can look at him with a dispassionate eye now and then, glad in her secret heart that she didn’t end up with him. Her “poor Agatha” moments aren’t too frequent (Hoccleve’s wife) and somewhat distress her when they do occur, but she knows that her life with Harriet is far preferable to being berated from an upstairs window about moth holes in a suit.

In this first novel, Pym sets the template for what will be her people in future novels: the quiet, the invisible, perhaps even the marginalised people the rest of us don’t particularly notice. She will take the Harriets, the Belindas, the Edith Liversidges who write their names in dust on other people’s pianos, the pompous jackasses like the Archdeacon and the Bishop Mbawawa, the earnest Canons and all the others, setting them in their villages, churches, jobs and homes. And she will observe like a falcon and tell us all about them, with her dry and delicious understated humour.

Sisters Belinda and Harriet Bede are spinsters in a small town. Belinda, the more sensible and quiet, still loves the archdeacon, a former beau, now married. Harriet, plump, flashier, and definitely not quiet, has a "thing" for young curates. It's fun and a little poignant to watch as they carry on with their village lives, pining over what they can't have, and ignoring the things they could have. A pleasant little story. ( )