Barbara Pym's Some Tame Gazelle

Some Tame gazelle or some gentle dove,                                                                                                      Something to love, oh, something to love.

--Thomas Haynes Bayly

For now everything would be as it had been before those two disturbing characters Mr. Mold and Bishop Grote appeared in the village.  In the future Belinda would continue to find such consolation as she needed in our greater English poets, when she was not gardening or making vests for the poor in Pimlico.

Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle (1950, Jonathan Cape Ltd.)

When I recently wrote about Pym last year I compared her to Trollope.  After reading Some Tame Gazelle I also find her deadpan humor reminds me of P.G. Wodehouse, and she and Wodehouse have in common that they both have created their own worlds, largely untouched by the outside.  Though Some Tame Gazelle was originally written in 1938, when Pym was at Oxford, it was not published until 1950 and in the United States in 1983, and there is no indication of any turmoil outside the unnamed village where it takes place.

Harriet and Belinda Bede are spinster sisters who live together and are closely involved with their local church, Belinda is still smitten with Archdeacon Hoccleve, even though he married his wife Agatha years ago.  Harriet still fancies Bishop Grote, who returns to England after thirty years in Africa and quickly proposes to Belinda and is rejected (he quickly finds a wife elsewhere in the village) while Mr. Mold, a visiting librarian, proposes to Harriet and is rejected; neither sister cares to give up their freedom for a husband.  While Belinda still thinks about Hoccleve Harriet is usually interested in the latest young curate, including Mr. Donne, who arrives at the beginning of the book and marries a linguistic scholar at the end.  Harriet has also rejected many overtures of marriage from Italian Count Ricardo Bianco and is pleased with the new curate who replaces Mr. Donne. 

The book is beautifully structured around the thoughts of Belinda --  Was it tonight that he was coming?  Belinda wondered vaguely.  It must be tonight she decided, catching sight of a bowl of exceptionally fine pears on the little table by the window, and expensive chrysanthemums in the vases when there were perfectly good Michaelmas  daisies in the garden.  Dear Harriet, she wasn't really extravagant, only too lavish in her hospitality -- and Belinda misses little of everything that goes on not only in her own household but everywhere else in the village