No Fond Return of Love

No Fond Return of Love (1961) is a minor Barbara Pym work, and I think it might have been the last one published before the long hiatus which led to Quartet in Autumn in 1977 and her rediscovery by a new audience of fans. It's not her best work, but it features the usual cast of middle-aged spinsters and attractive clergymen; there are also some young people floating about. There is a strong sense that the world is changing and that these young people are inhabiting quite a different reality from their elders -- where women are expected to work and live independently, rather than be content to perform volunteer 'good works' attached to some church, where they can go out drinking and dancing with relative freedom.

But even a second tier Barbara Pym is worth reading, for comfort if nothing else, and I am in the mood for comfort reading. It's so relaxing to escape into a world of seaside boarding-houses, sherry before dinner, pink velvet hats and jumble sales for the organ fund. It's a small, self-contained world, untroubled by politics or protests or violence or passion -- even love, though a disruptive force, is still obliquely expressed and sensibly regulated. It's weird that the momentum of the novel, such as it is, is provided by Dulcie becoming a kind of stalker of Aylwin Forbes, who she's met briefly at a conference: she checks out his brother's church, she goes to stay at his mother's hotel. And ultimately it seems that her obsession is going to be rewarded, which is perhaps not the best message! Dulcie and her eventual friend Viola are freelance indexers, and the original title of the book was A Thankless Task, which in some ways fits it better.