Barbara Pym, a novelist sometimes described as the twentieth-century Jane Austen, was a stalker. Her diaries describe her methods of “finding out” her objects of interest in vivid detail: looking them up in directories, “tailing” them across town to discover their home addresses and workplaces and places of worship, staging “chance” encounters, and collecting their “relics.” She invented “sagas,” games of investigation and fantasy that could last several years. Most of her victims were men; they were, to varying degrees, unavailable. Several of them were gay.

Article continues after advertisement

Throughout the 1950s, Pym had portrayed the love and labor of “excellent women”—spinsters cooking dinner for curates, bored wives matchmaking, girlfriends helping academics cross-reference the index—with screwball pathos. Praising her second novel as “a perfect book,” the poet John Betjeman wrote, “Excellent Women is England, and, thank goodness, it is full of them.” All of Pym’s respectable women indulge in some form of obsessive love. Her most mild-mannered heroines snoop through curtains and hedges; at their most audacious, her spinsters whip out binoculars and sneak uninvited into other people’s homes. (The men barely notice.)

It wasn’t until The Sweet Dove Died (written between 1963 and 1969, and reissued this September by New York Review of Books), that Pym began to reckon seriously with the impact that unrelenting womanly “devotion” might have on the beloved one—and on the spinster herself. In A Sweet Dove Died, stalking a gay man is rendered not as the expression of unrequited love but as the determined assertion of one woman’s ego.

*

In swinging sixties London, an elegant middle-aged woman named Leonora swoons in an auction room and is picked up by an antiques dealer and his nephew. The uncle, Humphrey, is solicitous, but Leonora prefers the nephew, James, who is golden-haired, malleable, and of uncertain sexuality. A series of emotional bidding wars ensue. Humphrey takes Leonora to an exhibition of historic portraits; she invites James into her exquisite flat, feeds him pâté, and presents him with her Victorian flower book. “Pink convolvulus,” he reads. The flower signifies “Worth sustained by Tender and Judicious affection”—a principle for which none of the protagonists of The Sweet Dove Died show much regard.

She invented “sagas,” games of investigation and fantasy that could last several years. Most of her victims were men; they were, to varying degrees, unavailable. Several of them were gay.

The first half of the book is a deliciously tart comedy, the currency of seduction here being chiefly tasty treats (shrimp in “an avocado pear,” chocolate mousse), self-consciously retrograde cultural outings, and what Leonora calls “objets d’art e de vertu.” (Leonora’s French accent is delightful, as we’d expect from a woman who dresses in shades of amethyst, lilac, and, in a wicked little jab from the author, “prune.”)

When James falls into bed with a woman his own age, the barbs of Pym’s humor sharpen. Plotting to safely install James in her own house, Leonora decides to evict her elderly upstairs tenant. When James moves in, he is surprised to find the windows have bars. The Oedipal undertone of Leonora’s explanation—that his room used to be a nursery—is more worrisome still.

But Leonora meets a serious rival in Ned, a glittering, young gay American who counters Leonora’s wistful Victoriana with a modern flat replete with shag rug—and a large bed covered in mauve velvet. As if unable to resist her own mortification, Leonora asks if the bed is comfortable. “I guess so,” says Ned, “though maybe comfort isn’t all I go for.”

*

Male homosexuality wasn’t decriminalized in Britain until 1967. But Pym, whose novels about conventional behavior shouldn’t be mistaken for conventional themselves, wrote about gay or bisexual male characters in almost all her books. Several characters were thinly disguised portraits of the novelist Robert Liddell, a friend from her time at Oxford. In her first mature novel, Crampton Hodnet (written in 1940 and published posthumously), “two giggling pansies” propel the plot with their gossip. In Excellent Women (1952), a civil servant with a sharp tongue and a taste for fine wine takes fright when his female friend starts musing on the nature of marriage. In Less Than Angels (1955), working-class Digby is startled when his roommate Mark picks up a debutante. She’s rich, Mark explains:

“She and the girl friend she lives with have a flat in Curzon Street and she said she might be taking a secretarial course or doing some modelling but that Daddy didn’t really want her to, only everyone did something nowadays …” he drifted out of the room.

“What hidden talents spring up in one’s friends,” Digby said. “I didn’t know Mark could imitate a young girl so well. I hope he’ll be able to follow up this promising start.”

Pym would go further in her next novel, A Glass of Blessings (1958), in which a gay character is cast as the leading man. The plot prefigures several elements of The Sweet Dove Died, but in a gentler register: Wilmet, a silly woman with soft hands, decides to reform the vaguely disreputable Piers by allowing him to fall in love with her—so it is for Piers’s own good that she enrolls in the class he teaches, visits his office unannounced, and pressures him to invite her home. Wilmet is married, pretty, and rich, and everyone—including Piers himself—observes her antics with a degree of indulgence. But when Wilmet finally secures an invitation to Piers’s flat, she is received by Keith, a young man who models sweaters for knitting catalogues and has gone to great effort to lay out a tea worthy of his lover’s upper-class female friend.

*

From early on, Pym’s romances in real life seemed to follow a pattern: dizzying infatuation then a mystifying fizzle—accompanied by stalking campaigns that combined giddy self-indulgence and exquisite self-torture. Many of these affairs had an unlikely quality. The man was aloof and somewhat resistant. He was 18 and she was 24. He was married to—if amicably separated from—her best friend and housemate. He was 33 and she was 39—and he wasn’t known to have relationships with women. Given how closely Pym’s novels drew from observation of her own milieu, perhaps it isn’t surprising that life started to imitate art. A version of Wilmet’s agonizing meal with Piers and Keith, with its mixture of personal embarrassment (Keith is beautiful) and snobbery (his table is covered with plastic doilies), would be endured by Pym herself several years later.

In early March 1966, Pym went out to dinner with the man she loved, Richard “Skipper” Campbell Roberts. In her diary, she recorded that two people joined them: her sister, Hilary, and a friend of Skipper’s, a man named Gordon. He was “fortyish but dressed and coiffed in Beatle style,” Pym wrote. Worse, Gordon gave Skipper a ridiculously domestic gift—”a drying cloth patterned with dachshunds.”

Pym had been immediately taken with Skipper, a handsome antiques dealer 18 years her junior, when she met him, in late 1962. He was flattered by her attention: At 50, Pym was the critically acclaimed author of six published novels. Skipper, for his part, was enticingly exotic to Pym. His family had been among the first white settlers in the Bahamas, and he had grown up in Nassau, in a mansion named “Lucky Hill.” He was devoted to a domineering, peacock-owning mother. Perhaps with regret, Pym decided this material was outside her range.

From early on, Pym’s romances in real life seemed to follow a pattern: dizzying infatuation then a mystifying fizzle—accompanied by stalking campaigns that combined giddy self-indulgence and exquisite self-torture.

She must have had some idea early on that her love-object was gay. For one thing, when Pym met him, Skipper—despite his wealth—was sharing a house with “a nice young man called John.” There were other warning signs: Pym and Skipper were introduced by the critic Robert Smith, another younger gay man on whom Pym had once pinned romantic hopes. (She had met Smith through Robert Liddell, the gay friend who, though never a love interest, she had briefly targeted in her pursuit of his best friend during her undergraduate years.)

Nonetheless, Pym spent several months in a “romantic haze” after meeting Skipper, as her friend and biographer Hazel Holt writes in A Lot to Ask (Macmillan, 1990). When Skipper began to pull away, Pym sent a love letter, demanded its return—and then wrote again, disappointed he had returned it without a reply of his own. In The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym (2021), biographer Paula Byrne observes that Pym used her status as a novelist to hold Skipper’s attention, sending him short fiction scenes that showed him to be her muse. Just a few weeks before the dachshund-patterned dinner, she wrote Skipper a valentine:

O, Sweet Bahamian, cruel Fate
Has sent you to me much too late
Tormenting me with many a Scene
Of Happiness that might have been …

Pym’s collected letters and diaries reflect many attempts to rekindle the spark—and a heartbreak that lasted years. They also show that she almost immediately started to mine the relationship for a new book, The Sweet Dove Died.

By the time the bombshell scene of Wilmet-Piers-Keith (or Barbara-Skipper-Gordon) is reanimated in The Sweet Dove Died, it has taken on a different register again. After showing off his flat with its purple bed, Ned abruptly sends Leonora home in a cab. After she leaves, Ned advises James that Leonora will “get the message” once he moves out and stops calling her. “She’s the proud type who prefers to suffer in silence,” jeers Ned. “Like a wounded animal crawling away to die.”

Ned’s disdain is almost as crushing as James’s betrayal because it says something larger about Leonora’s right to exist in the 1960s at all. In A Glass of Blessings, Wilmet’s relationship with Piers and Keith ultimately leaves Wilmet disinhibited—and improved. She and her husband confess their respective attempts at infidelity, laugh about them, and become modern people. Ned—like many of Pym’s gay characters—is someone with contemporary taste. He could invite Leonora into the modern world (as Keith and Piers do Wilmet), but instead he rejects her, relegating her to the past. She might as well be dead.

And unlike Wilmet, Leonora doesn’t have the security of marriage and youth to fall back on. Ned’s “wounded animal” descriptor is apt: By the time we meet her in The Sweet Dove Died, Leonora has developed the feral ruthlessness of an aging unmarried woman fighting to preserve the social status of sexual attractiveness without sacrificing her autonomy. When Humphrey touches Leonora with “appraising” hands, she feels a wave of fear and revulsion. The affection of James, by contrast, affirms the power of her femininity without threatening an assault on her personal dignity. After a trip to Covenant Garden with Skipper in May 1964, Pym wrote a diary entry fusing heroine and author’s pleasure in a relationship of her own design: “If ‘they’ went to Covent Garden Leonora would like to feel the touch of his sleeve against her bare arm … Here he is mine she thinks, the young admirer she had created for herself.”

But in taking on the role of Pygmalion, Leonora (and Pym) exposes herself to the treachery of her own admiring “creation.” In its final act, The Sweet Dove Died opens into the crevasse of Leonora’s grief, in which she gains self-knowledge but loses her sense of hope for the future. Even if James returns to her, even if she marries Humphrey, she will be alone.

*

In the 1940s and 50s, Pym’s spinsters had occupied a status of respectable wrongness. As memorably characterized in Excellent Women, they are the “rejected ones”—women expected to dedicate their lives to good works as a kind of penance for their failure to marry. “Being unmarried,” Pym wrote, was “a positive rather than negative state”—and likely a permanent one for a generation of women living in the aftermath of World War II. Perhaps more importantly, like Jane Austen’s Anne Elliot, they were “English gentlewomen,” taught that it is a woman’s wait for love in “desolate tranquility.” Left to the company of her thoughts and feelings, Pym’s spinster becomes observant. She is the novelist within the novel: an appreciator of the monumental significance of the trivial things. And when in need of sexual, emotional, or intellectual outlet, she stalks.

In a particularly zany period in the 1950s, Pym and her sister would invent a “saga” about their young gay male neighbors, whom they nicknamed “Bear” and “Squirrel.” Pym kept a log of the men’s movements, and Bob Smith and Hazel Holt were enlisted to help. As Paula Byrne points out in The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, Squirrel’s orange pullover would later be worn by Keith in A Glass of Blessings.

For unmarried middle-class women indulging in occasional bursts of sexually charged espionage, closeted gay bachelors were natural persons of interest, similarly careful and inventive in living within the limits of social toleration. Indeed, as Pym acknowledged in another diary entry in which she and Leonora appear interchangeable, an erotic but impossible love-object like Skipper or James might even be preferable: “She thinks perhaps this is the kind of love I’ve always wanted because absolutely nothing can be done about it.”

In taking on the role of Pygmalion, Leonora (and Pym) exposes herself to the treachery of her own admiring “creation.” In its final act, The Sweet Dove Died opens into the crevasse of Leonora’s grief, in which she gains self-knowledge but loses her sense of hope for the future.

But by this time, the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill had transformed Britain, and the delicate sexual frisson of spinsterhood was out of date—at least in the eyes of editors. In March 1963, Pym’s longtime publisher, Jonathan Cape, summarily rejected not just her latest manuscript, An Unsuitable Attachment, but all her work as no longer publishable. Other publishers followed suit. In the years that followed, manuscripts for An Unsuitable Attachment, The Sweet Dove Died, and Quartet in Autumn (eventually shortlisted for the Booker Prize) would be rejected by twenty publishers. Pym would spend nearly fifteen years in the “wilderness” of unfashionability.

No wonder Skipper’s attention meant so much—and the suggestion that she might bore him was so painful. It must have seemed not just a comment on her personal desirability but a comment on her relevance as a writer, one with the power to enchant and entertain.

*

Pym was “rediscovered” in 1977, when both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil nominated her as the most underrated writer of the past 75 years in a Times Literary Supplement poll. Reissues and new publications followed; The Sweet Dove Died was finally released with Macmillan, in 1978, to critical acclaim. Pym enjoyed the accolades and outpouring of public affection while she could. Her breast cancer had returned, and aware that she was dying, she worked quickly to complete a novel she knew would be published posthumously. She gave it a wry, bittersweet title: A Few Green Leaves. She died in January 1980, at 66 years old.

In The Sweet Dove Died, James treats Leonora callously, but he isn’t to blame for the high stakes the relationship has for her. Leonora’s artistry, by which she sculpts a version of James more handsome, sophisticated, and loving than the model himself, is her own undoing. Yet that same artistry is more than manipulative narcissism; it is the talent Leonora has to offer the world. Just as James isn’t wrong in refusing to play the part, she isn’t wrong to attempt to build something beautiful.

In an interview after Pym’s death, her friend Henry Harvey made a curious observation. During her time at Oxford, Pym had made Harvey the target of one of her most intense stalking campaigns. Their hot-cold relationship was a source of pain and inspiration: Of Pym’s oblivious male characters, the handsome and bad-tempered Archbishop Henry Hoccleve in Some Tame Gazelle is among the most memorable. Yet even as Pym stalked him, slept with him, and pined after him, there was an element of unreality in her ardor, Harvey recalled. This “pretend play” of “being-in-love” and “being-in-Oxford” were, for Pym, “better kept as pretend play,” he said. “That way they could be turned into art.”