After her brief charitable sortie into geriatric bedsitterdom in Quartet In Autumn, Barbara Pym [in The Sweet Dove Died] is back in Knightsbridge, exploring the romantic half-attachments of a new well-heeled heroine. It's as calculatedly thinblooded as her other novels but, like them, it achieves surprising pathos through the very limitedness of the expectations it sees in its characters and encourages in the reader….

But it's the ironic control that gets the emotional saliva going. (Miss Pym is a very culinary novelist, in her finishing-school way) so that when she finally puts a small chop on your plate it can seem like the contents of half an abattoir….

The danger is one of overstating Miss Pym's claims. What she does, after all, has been done in more substance before—not only by Jane Austen (a frequent, and inflated, source of comparison) but by Elizabeth Bowen…. (p. 27)

Jeremy Treglown...