Some tame gazelle

By Barbara Pym

Book Overview

Barbara Pym is a master at capturing the subtle mayhem that takes place in the apparent quiet of the English countryside. Fifty-something sisters Harriet and Belinda Bede live a comfortable, settled existence. Belinda, the quieter of the pair, has for years been secretly in love with the town's pompous (and married) archdeacon, whose odd sermons leave members of his flock in muddled confusion. Harriet, meanwhile, a bubbly extrovert, fends off proposal after proposal of marriage. The arrival of Mr. Mold and Bishop Grote disturb the peace of the village and leave the sisters wondering if they'll ever return to the order of their daily routines. Some Tame Gazelle, first published in Britain nearly 50 years ago, was the first of Pym's nine novels.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006080713X
• ISBN13: 9780060807139
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Perennial Library
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Touching and funny

In the early chapters of "Some Tame Gazelles" we are taken on a "Pym moments" romp through the day-to-day lives of the spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede. Timid, sentimental Belinda (one of Pym's "Excellent Women")elder of the two, a faithful church worker, has loved the peevish, married Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve ("dear Henry") for over 30 years. Belinda quotes 18th Century poets, wears "sensible" shoes and longs for "some sympathetic person to whom she could say that Dr. Johnson had been so right when he had said that all change is of itself an evil." Plump ("attractive in a fat Teutonic way"),jolly and style-conscious Harriet, in her middle fifties, has a fondness for young curates to whom she serves boiled chicken suppers and makes presents of hand-knitted socks and home-made jellies. We meet: The Reverend Edgar Donne, the latest in a long line of young curates fussed over by Harriet; Edith Liversidge ("a kind of decayed gentlewoman"), the disheveled, blunt-speaking neighbor with an interest in sanitation arrangements; the dreary, snobbish Connie Aspinall, who basks in the memory of her glory days when she was companion to Lady Grudge of Belgrave Square ("a kind of relation of one of Queen Alexandra's Ladies-in-Waiting"); Miss Prior, the touchy sewing woman, in a tender and humorous episode involving cauliflower cheese; the melancholy Count Ricardo Bianco, who on a regular basis offers proposals of marriage to Harriet. There is Archdeacon Hoccleve, the object of Belinda's devotion ("her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning"), whose standoffish behavior and proclivity for choosing unsuitable prayers and for preaching obscure literary sermons no one understands win him little favor among the people in his parish. And there are more matchless Pym characters set against a quintessential Pym story, touching and funny and quite wonderful.

Funny--But There's That Mean Streak

Barbara Pym is a brilliant writer. I, of course, am not the only one who thinks so, or we might never have seen half of the work she eventually published. After writing and publishing 5 novels, with both critical and commercial success, Pym found her 6th novel rejected by her publisher, and by every other publisher she submitted it to. The 60s had arrived, and the sharply pointed humor of Barbara Pym was no longer in fashion. In spite of the rejections, Pym continued to write for 17 more years with what appeared to be no hope of sharing her writing. Luckily, as with most Pym stories, a bittersweet ending allowed the world to have another half dozen Pym novels in print to delight in. SOME TAME GAZELLE, the second novel she wrote (the first was very much juvenilia) and the first she published (following two separate rounds of editing during the next 12 years), is her funniest. Casting her eye to the future, she wrote about her Oxford friends, and about herself and her sister, Hilary, in middle age. Full of inside jokes, the novel's tongue-in-cheek tone sparkles throughout. Pym is a brilliant writer because her sentences are gems. She is funny because of WHAT she says and HOW she says it. And, finally, she is MEAN in the most pleasurable possible way. Pick up any novel by Pym and delight in her. You will be well rewarded.

One of Miss Pym's most enjoyable

Although it was not her first novel to be published, this was one of Barbara Pym's earliest endeavors. I read in A Very Private Eye (a collection of Miss Pym's letters and journals) that she started writing it in her early 20's, basing the main characters on herself, her sister, the man she was in love with at Oxford, and other friends. However, she aged them all considerably, making them 50-ish years old. I think she may have worked on the book again later, so I don't think it's actually the work of a 22-year old. Miss Pym appears as Belinda Bede and her sister as Harriet. In the story, they are two spinsters living together in a small village. Interestingly, later in life Barbara Pym and her sister did live together. The character of their clergyman, a married Archdeacon, is based on a man sharing the same first name (Henry) whom Barbara Pym was devoted to in college. He subsequently broke her heart by marrying another woman. The fictional Henry, too, is married, but has been so for 25 years. Belinda/Barbara is still devoted to him, but with warm affection instead of burning passion. It's hard to explain the appeal of this book. It has humor; Barbara Pym saw the funny side of ordinary happenings and people. And it has pathos, which is a crucial ingredient of the best humor. There is even a touch of feminism, although gentle. For example, when Henry remarks to Belinda that women "enjoy" being martyrs, she repies that they may martyr themselve, but they leave the enjoyment of it to the men. Like Jane Austen, Barbara Pym limits herself to "a few families in a village," and like Jane Austen she succeeds in providing insight, irony, and, withal, enjoyment and optimism.