No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym

What makes a suitable match? Might remaining unmarried be the right choice? How do you recover from a broken heart? These are the questions Dulcie Mainwaring, proofreader and indexer, faces in Pym’s sixth novel No Fond Return of Love (1961).

The real delight is Pym’s pointed observations and tart humour.

In her thirties and rejected by her fiancé, Dulcie is a spinster out to pasture. She lets her grooming slide, distracts herself with work, and turns her attention from herself to the lives of those around her.

One of those lives is that of key-note speaker Aylwin Forbes, who she meets at a conference for editors and proofreaders. He’s quite the dish and Dulcie has an instant crush.

But he’d never be interested in her. He’s a dashing, important, married man known for chasing young skirt. So she nurses her wounds in the shadows and researches him instead, uncovering unsavoury details about him and his family. She’s quite the sly detective. These days we might call her a stalker.

While it all looks like tea at the vicarage and doily patterns, the real delight of Barbara Pym’s novels is her subtle acid and pointed observations. There’s humour in the gap between what her heroine says and what she really thinks. Pym pricks her rapier at marriage, academics, spinsters, foreigners, the English, religion, men, women, and dog owners: no one is spared. Not even herself: a damp copy of Pym’s first novel Some Tame Gazelle wilts in Dulcie’s bathroom.

In the end, I thought Aylwin far beneath the worth of Dulcie, but this is a novel in which life’s cruelties and deep apricots tarts are mentioned in the very same breath.

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