[The narratives of Barbara Pym's novels] have the air of being picked up almost at random: the characters have usually been living for some time in the circumstances in which we meet them, and yet some small incident—new tenants in the flat below, a new curate ("but what a pity it was that his combinations showed"), new friends made at a conference of indexers and bibliographers at a girls' school in Derbyshire—serves to set off a chain of modest happenings among interrelated groups of characters, watched or even recounted by a protagonist who tempers an ironic perception of life's absurdities with a keen awareness of its ability to bruise….

The properties may sound trivial …, yet Miss Pym's gay, confident gift invests everything it handles with an individual—comedy, is it? Certainly the reader is always on the edge of smiling…. Amusement is constantly foiling more pretentious...