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.

Crampton Hodnet

Finally published in 1980 after Barbara Pym's career revival, Crampton Hodnet was actually written in the 1930s and put aside because of the war. I think it was Pym's very first novel, and it contains all the classic Pym ingredients -- spinsters and widows, busy with good works, clergymen, foolish academics and young women who are way too good for them. It's set in North Oxford, which I'm acquainted with through Penelope Lively's The House in Norham Gardens, where much is made of the tall dark brooding house. The house where Miss Doggett and Jessie Morrow live is described as 'ugly,' and from the cover, it's definitely the same kind of house!

What I especially love about Barbara Pym is that, at the end of the day, nothing much actually happens. Even grand schemes of elopement fizzle out; people somehow find themselves embroiled in love affairs without actually feeling that keen; misunderstandings abound; proposals of marriage are made and dismissed almost in the same breath. If Quartet in Autumn was melancholic, Crampton Hodnet is bursting with low-key joy. It's very funny and I laughed out loud a couple of times, whereas Pym's novels usually provoke a wry smile.