Sweet Dove Died [Minkštas viršelis]

"Leonora Eyre, an attractive and elegant, but essentially selfish, middle-aged woman, becomes friendly with antique dealer Humphrey Boyce and his nephew James. Both men are attracted to Leonora, but Leonora prefers the young, good-looking James to the more "suitable" Humphrey. While James is away on a buying trip, Leonora discovers to her annoyance that he has been seeing Phoebe, a girl of his own age. Leonora makes use of Humphrey to humiliate Phoebe, and turns out a sitting tenant in order that James can take up a flat in her own house. She does this in an apparent attempt to control his life. While abroad, the bisexual James has begun a relationship with an American, the amoral Ned, who returns with him to London. Ned prises James out of Leonora's grasp, only to engage with other partners then return to the States to escape the complications. James attempts a reconciliation with Leonora, but she refuses to give him a second opportunity to hurt her, and settles for the admiration of the less attractiveHumphrey"--

An acidly funny novel about a woman who falls for a much younger man by one of Britain's great writers of social comedy, now back in print.

A lesser-known, darker sister to Barbara Pym's Excellent Women.

The Sweet Dove Died, the most brilliant and incisive of Barbara Pym’s novels, depicts a woman’s attachment to a man much younger than herself. Beautiful and self-absorbed, Leonora Eyre has a passion for collecting Victorian objects and is coolly indifferent towards everything outside of her fastidious, elegant existence. When she is courted by Humphrey, a widowed antiques dealer, she disdains his advances, preferring rather the attentions of his twenty-four-year-old nephew James.

Leonora’s possession of James is challenged, however, first by Phoebe, a bookish young woman his own age, and then by the suave and seductive Ned, a visiting American professor with whom James quickly becomes infatuated. Barbara Pym’s sharp eye for comedy and shrewd observation of English middle-class manners are on full display in this finely wrought novel of love, loss, and all the hopes and disappointments that befall the human heart.