Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym

It’s all tea, corset repairs, and the awful possibility of change in this tale of two spinsters.

Never let your half-mended corset show when the vicar comes to tea.

For thirty years, Belinda Bede’s unrequited heart has beat for the local Archdeacon - a handsome, proud, over-read man. But now his efficient wife Agatha is going on a health retreat to Germany, and the Archdeacon has no one to mend his socks and make his jam. Will Belinda and dear Henry maintain their decades-long entente cordiale, or will there be one too many intimate afternoon teas? Belinda’s comfortable routine is suddenly in mortal danger.

And what of her sister Harriet, plump and lipsticked and high-heeled? Will she finally marry and leave Belinda all alone?

It’s all quite the drama in the village these days.

Barbara Pym is queen of the passive-aggressive dining room scene. No one skewers a vicar quite like her. Pym’s art is the delicious gap between what a character says and what they think, and she’s merciless - even with her heroines.

He thought it unlikely that it would be a literary quotation and yet it seemed somehow Elizabethan. Perhaps Belinda would know it. She often wasted her time reading things that nobody else would dream of reading. (p.49)

Here’s to reading things nobody else would ever dream of reading.

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