A Few Green Leaves
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The final novel by the famed British novelist Barbara Pym—a characteristically witty story about an academic who becomes enmeshed in the eccentric village life that she means to study.
Completed barely two months before her death, A Few Green Leaves was Barbara Pym’s last novel, and is an acutely observed and wry portrait of an English village in the 1970s. The book follows Emma Howick, an academic in her mid-thirties, who moves to her mother’s cottage in a small West Oxfordshire village.
Emma hopes to write an anthropological study of modern village life, but she soon grows to be a part of that life as she comes to know the eccentric and delightful villagers: widowed rector Tom Dagnall and his Hellenophile sister Daphne; old Dr. G., who treats young patients, and young Dr. Shrubsole, who tends to the geriatric; former Anglican priest, now food critic Adam Price; and many others.
The villagers and their myriad wants spur Emma to contemplate her own desires, and when an old flame reappears in her life, she must decide between staying in the past or moving boldly beyond it, into the future.
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym (1913-1980) was born in Oswestry, Shropshire. She was educated at Huyton College, Liverpool, and St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she gained an Honours Degree in English Language and Literature. From 1958-1974, she worked as an editorial secretary at the International African Institute. Her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, was published in 1950, and was followed by Excellent Women (1952), Jane and Prudence (1953), Less than Angels (1955), A Glass of Blessings (1958) and No Fond Return of Love (1961). During the sixties and early seventies her writing suffered a partial eclipse and, discouraged, she concentrated on her work for the Institute, from which she retired in 1974 to live in Oxfordshire. A renaissance in her fortunes came in 1977, when both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil chose her as one of the most underrated novelists of the century. With astonishing speed, she emerged, after sixteen years of obscurity, to almost instant fame and recognition. Quartet in Autumn was published in 1977 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Sweet Dove Died followed in 1978, and A Few Green Leaves was published posthumously. Barbara Pym died in January 1980.
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