The Sweet Dove Died is a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was an English novelist. In 1977 her career was revived when two prominent writers, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century...

, first published in 1978. The title is a quotation from a poem, "I Had a Dove", by John Keats

John Keats

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...

.

The novel was begun during the 1960s, after Pym's previous novel, An Unsuitable Attachment

An Unsuitable Attachment

An Unsuitable Attachment is a novel by Barbara Pym, written in 1963 and published posthumously in 1982.This novel is notable as being the first of Pym's novels to be rejected by publishers after she had established herself as a novelist. The book was originally rejected by Cape, who had published...

had been rejected by several publishers. The Sweet Dove Died was also rejected, and Pym substantially rewrote it after her friend Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...

 suggested improvements. It was not, however, published until after her "comeback" of the late 1970s.

The plot is generally believed to have been inspired by Pym's brief romance with an American antique dealer, Richard Roberts, known to his friends as "Skipper".

Synopsis

Leonora Eyre, an attractive and elegant, but essentially selfish, middle-aged woman, becomes friendly with antique dealer Humphrey Boyce and his nephew James. Both men are attracted to Leonora, but Leonora prefers the young, good-looking James to the more "suitable" Humphrey. While James is away on a buying trip, Leonora discovers to her annoyance that he has been seeing Phoebe, a girl of his own age. Leonora makes use of Humphrey to humiliate Phoebe, and turns out a sitting tenant in order that James can take up a flat in her own house. She does this in an apparent attempt to control his life. While abroad, the bisexual James has begun a relationship with an American, the amoral Ned, who later follows him to London. Ned prises James out of Leonora's grasp, only to reject him for another lover. James attempts a reconciliation with Leonora, but she refuses to give him a second opportunity to hurt her, and settles for the admiration of the less attractive Humphrey.

As with all Pym's fiction, the novel contains many literary references, notably to works by Keats, John Milton

John Milton

John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...

 and Henry James

Henry James

Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

.

Critical response

The book was widely praised by critics, with some exceptions. Many long-standing Pym readers were disappointed by the less overtly comic tone of the book, compared with her earlier novels. However, it is generally recognised as one of her best-constructed and most mature works.