A Few Green Leaves

...It is a book to be welcomed and savored, but perhaps not without prior acquisition of an appreciation for her other, more major, novels...

...In Quartet in Autumn, however, Miss Pym began to widen her focus-exploring within approximately the same number of pages the lives of Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia, told from four points of view...

...I suppose the clergy and the doctors have taken the place of the gentry," Emma said...

...Yes- I certainly miss the manor and all it stood for- we haven't got any kind of centre to the village now," said Miss Lee...

...The result necessarily was less intense...

...She is one of the few novelists to write of the continuing relationships between middle-aged protagonists and their elderly parents...

...They live alone because they choose to...

...Since that time most of her earlier books have been reprinted...

...A Few Green Leaves is ambitious...

...At the time of her death, her books were much in demand in her country, and were finding an audience in America...

...Gellibrand to Miss Lickerish to Mrs...

...There Woolf tried to depict England as it was then, but also to indicate that all Englishmen were members one of another, each a part of the whole, acting different parts but being of the same body...

...The novel is buttressed by flying references to, and a subplot concerning, Druid ruins and an 18th-century country manor...

...Overnight she found herself a "fashionable" writer...

...Her intent here is to capture a portrait of an entire English village and the enduring lives and customs there...

...Either they become "excellent women" like Mildred Lathbury, of the novel bearing that title-loving their neighbors with Christian charity...

...There are too many tiny pieces shifting into place in this kaleidoscope...

...Major" is a peculiar adjective to apply to Miss Pym's books, which are about storms in a teapot...

...Publishers took note, and later that same year a new Pym novel, which she had begun when retirement from the quarterly loomed, appeared...

...Quartet in Autumn was followed by another new novel, The Sweet Dove Died (1978), and now by A Few Green Leaves (1980)-a novel completed barely two months before her death...

...Between 1950 and 1961, Miss Pym published six novels, including Excellent Women (1952), Less Than Angels {1955),/I Glass of Blessings (1958), and No Fond Return of Love (1961...

...Perhaps the people have been swept away too,'' said her mother...

...Particular care is taken to contrast life today with what existed on the manor: ". . . all that patronage and paternalism or whatever you like to call it has been swept away, and good thing, too...

...It was titled Quartet in Autumn...

...Yet the central heroine, Emma Howick, is an anthropologist, and her sociological concerns become Miss Pym's...

...The result is at once her narrowest and broadest work...

...Miss Pym does not allow herself to fully realize any of her villagers in the leisurely manner of her earlier novels...

...And, unlike the self-pitying heroines of the novels of Jean Rhys (whose great ''comeback'' her own career resembles), Pym's spinsters and widows do not pine over their single state...

...And yet, there is something ingratiating and admirable about this final attempt at the English novel...

...Yet Miss Pym darts from Emma to the rector Tom Dagnall to Dr...

...Martin Shurbsole to Miss Olive Lee to Graham Pettifer to Dr...

...Dyer to Adam Prince to Miss Vereker to Isobel Mound to Terry Skate to- well, you get the idea...

...Yet for all their limitations, her novels are dense with psychological insight and larded with wit...

...This is highly self-conscious writing...

...or they come to love only themselves, like Leonora Eyre of The Sweet Dove Died, who concludes, when one came to think of it, the only flowers that were really perfect were those, like the peonies that went so well with one's charming room, that possessed the added grace of having been presented to oneself . . . Mildred and Leonora and Wilmet For-syth, of A Glass of Blessings, are fully-drawn characters whose desires and feelings are highly palpable...

...But when she presented her next manuscript, it was rejected by no less than twenty publishers...

...The teapot is usually an Anglican parish, and the comparison to Jane Austen's work has been made often enough...

...Miss Pym did not repeat herself...

...And therein lies a terrible irony...

...Emma has the makings of a typical repressed Pym heroine, her very ordinariness made interesting by her awareness of it...

...Robert Phillips Barbara pym died on January 11 of last year, in a small Oxfordshire village cottage which she had come to share with her sister...

...Now, in A Few Green Leaves, Miss Pym opens focus even wider...

...For sixteen years she published no fiction...

...In this respect Barbara Pym's final vision compares with Virginia Woolf s; a striking vision, but an anomaly in the context of the body of her own narrow, splendid work.w, splendid work...

...Then, in 1977, both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, responding to a poll conducted among literati by the London Times Literary Supplement, listed her as "the most underrated writer of this century...

...In pitting time present against time past, in parading history before us in the living flesh, the book approaches the daring and conceit of Virginia Woolf s final novel, Between the Acts, also set in an English village...

...Miss Pym is not concerned merely with contemporary time...

...She was dropped, called ' 'out of date.'' She retreated into silence, presumably not writing, and supporting herself as an assistant editor for the quarterly Africa...

...Miss Pym wrote only short novels on narrow subjects: the comforts of religion, the poignancy of living alone, the perpetual quest for usefulness, the limitations of marriageabil-ity and marriage...

...Within the strict conventions of the British social novel she was also highly original...