The Sweet Dove Died

Barbara Pym continues on a path away from the genteel middle-aged ladies of the Anglican church. The Sweet Dove Died is named for a line from Keats:

I had a dove, and the sweet dove died;
And I have thought it died of grieving;
O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied
With a single thread of my own hand’s weaving.

This is the feeling encapsulated in Pym’s story.

Lenora, a middle-aged woman befriends well-to-do Humphrey, 60, and his nephew James. Unwilling to admit her aging, she is in love with the 25-year-old nephew while the uncle is enthralled by her. Lenora uses that situation to her best interest until James is enticed away by the young American, Ned.

As in life, the situation leads only to unhappiness all around. I love that show more Pym didn’t sugar-coat the outcome.

Read this if: you enjoy tales that look honestly at relationships between men and women, in a satiric fashion. 4 stars show less

Leonora Eyre is as delicate as any fussy feathered creature in a Keats poem. She has a desire to make everything perfect, as a matter of fact, she treasures lovely objects more than she does her fellow humans. When the 'cold pastoral' call goes out, or 'forlorn' is the warning, her ears are unhearing, she's right at home among the fussy birds or the greek receptacles. Though she does show when push comes to shove in the world of 'romance' a surprising capability to deal with a what can only be called a negative.
As usual clothes are important. The wrappage is never adventitious:

And now Ned was looking at her in a most curious way. His eyes moved from her face, down over her body and legs; even her feet did not escape his scrutiny. . . show more Ned's appraisal was completely lacking in sexuality or desire. But after a while Leonora realized what he was doing - simply calculating the cost of her clothes and everything about her, including her hairstyle, make-up, jewellery, and even her shoes.

We get a feel for Leonora with this next bit as much as anything else:

'Just give me a dutiful kiss,' said Leonara lightly.
He bent to kiss her cheek, his hands touching her stiffly lacquered hair, the feeling of which gave him a slight shock as if she were made of some brittle unreal substance. 'Darling,' he said, 'they're so beautiful. Did Humphrey go with you to buy them?'

Leonora had just given her young 'love interest' an expensive birthday present. I read this searching novel in one sitting. For a slow reader like myself, I'll often read several pages aloud, this should tell you something. If you are slow on the up-take, what I'm telling you is that there is much pleasure in the reading of THE SWEET DOVE DIED. show less

One of Pym's most incisive and observational novels. A strange beast, this, flitting between points of view and always so darned ironic, every line left with half of it unspoken, asking the reader to intuit, and do so much of the work, but always led on by the wry human insights Pym seemed to do so well.

Leonora Eyre, independently wealthy (although not absurdly so), seems to feel an emptiness in her life but she can't quite express it. She certainly doesn't understand work, and she's not inclined towards charity, but she is too intelligent to truly enjoy the mundane circularity that weighs down the life of the ordinary person. And, yet, she's not intelligent enough to be an academic, as so many Pym characters are (one gets the sense show more that her grasp of poetry is half-hearted much of the time). All of this makes her an odd fit for a central character in a Pym, and perhaps this is why I found myself more absorbed by the younger characters who are more my age. James, Phoebe, and - yes - Ned, that American whom many Pymmians consider the greatest villain in her entire oeuvre, although I don't necessarily think he's any more to blame for anything than Leonora is.

This is an affecting and enjoyable read. It's an unusual Pymin that her decision to centre on Leonora puts us at more of a remove than usual from the tertiary characters, and renders James - the second most important character - as secondary himself. But I'll be glad when next Sweet Dove comes up in my Pym rotation, to enjoy its variety from the usual world of musty Pym academe, and for the pleasures she always offers as a novelist. show less

There is something succulent in the late novels of Barbara Pym, like deliberately over-ripened fruit, or a haunch of game hung for an extended period. One feels that Pym knows her characters almost too well, and that she may not particularly like them. Yet she spends time with them, and invites us to do the same: slightly distasteful women, ambiguous and calculating men, vapid gentlewomen, and the ever-charming clergyman (here occurring only as a brief fellow train traveller sharing a table for tea). So how does Pym take a character one doesn’t particularly like, such as Leonora Eyre, and in the space of a single short chapter render her entirely sympathetic, even pitiable? Only exquisite mastery of her craft could explain Pym’s show more remarkable affect upon her reader.

The elegant Leonora is ageing more or less gracefully. She enjoys the attentions of men, both older and younger, whilst knowing how to keep restrictive commitment at bay. She may always know the right word or gesture, but like Henry James’ prose, which is alluded to, she can come across as cold. Of course that suits some English men perfectly, especially those who would be somewhat overwhelmed by a real passionate relation with a woman. Sexual relations, which are subtext in the early Pym novels, are rendered explicit here. However, they remain curiously unreal, no doubt because they were never Pym’s object. And that raises the question, what really is Pym’s object in this novel? The answer lies in the reading, and I suspect will change as you read it again and again. As I will. Always recommended. show less

Barbara Pym does unlikeable, yet marginally sympathetic, women like no one else. In Sweet Dove we have Leonora Eyre, an unmarried woman of a certain age who lives alone and likes it, so she believes, until she meets Humphrey Boyce and his nephew James. Although she considers herself too old for romance (and one wonders whether she was ever very much interested in it) she begins to spend a good deal of time with each of them, forming a very strong attachment to James in particular. Pym brilliantly illuminates Leonora's character, showing the reader some melancholy truths about this "perfect" lady, who can see the motes in everyone's eye but her own. I seem to say this every time I pick up one of her novels, but this may be my favorite show more Pym so far.

Reviewed in August 2013 show less

Leonora Eyre lives a life of ordered ease and comfort, with no lack of creature comforts, entirely self-sufficient and self-satisfied. She is beautiful, with perfect clothes and hair, of indeterminate age but holding it well, referring to herself constantly as "one". She dines out with men who are never encouraged to expect more from her than her company at dinner. She has a few women friends whom she holds in faint disdain for the lesser quality of their lives . She is, quite frankly, a terrible snob, selfish in the extreme and cold to basic human warmths and interactions, of which she seems incapable. The elderly woman who lives in the flat upstairs, Mrs. Foxe, is viewed as a nuisance and something of an eye-sore. Her neighbour with show more umpteen siamese cats is an object of pity. "One lives one's own life."

Into her settled life come James Boyce and his uncle, Humphrey. And slowly, carefully, Pym unravels the cocoon Leonora has woven around herself as hitherto unfelt emotions seep into her life. She develops a schwarm for James, despite his being approximately 20 years her junior. With her careful meals, her delightful attention, she creates a dependency in him for her. But discordant notes in the form of Phoebe Sharpe and Ned, the American studying Keats, soon play a jangled tune in her life, as the ineffectual James blows this way and that. The "sweet dove" of the title is from a poem by Keats, in which the dove dies of grief, its feet tied with a string "of my own hand's weaving'. This is Leonora's fate, to be tethered, and to try to tether James too tightly. The perfection of her life cracks, just as her fine face shows its cracks in the sunlight near the end of the book. Her friends laugh about her in the kitchen when she visits. She buys the house she lives in and turfs Miss Foxe out but the latter is the victor, as she has already made plans to move into a seniors' residence in an old monastery. Humphrey sees through her. And for all her scorn of Meg with her relationship with Colin and his lovers, she is no different in her sad one with James. When she says "One would hardly want to be like the people who fill the emptiness of their lives with an animal.." near the end of the story, she becomes an object of pity for us. And yet it is the skill of Pym's writing that we don't despise her but see her ultimate frailty and humanity. Despite her overweening pride, Pym allows her a shard of salvation for she will not woo James "back into his cage". Her pride becomes a fragile dignity as she gathers its tattered remnants around her to carry on in her own terms.

Pym is extraordinary at portraying these people, these lives. No nuance is missed, no subtlety overlooked or dealt with heavily. Again, as with all her stories I've read so far, I am in awe of her delicacy in wielding the scalpel of her pen to tell the lives of these deceptively ordinary people. show less

I am a huge Barbara Pym fan, but this one gets a pan. It was written later in her life and I think she tried to get a different vibe by throwing in some sex, references to cannabis, and a main character who has relationships with both men and women. But the weird thing is that her main character, Leonora, is really just like all the main characters in her earlier novels. So it felt confusing.

Only recommend for Barbara Pym completists.