Barbara Pym was a good novelist—which, God knows, is rare; but she was not an outstanding one.

Just how good she was, her posthumously published A Few Green Leaves makes amply clear; but it makes no less clear that she was a writer of an extremely narrow range. Not for her wuthering heights or lower depths, but merely the literary equivalent of the bland, cosy, comforting landscape of the Oxfordshire to which she retired. (p. 21)

Barbara Pym completed this book when she knew that she was under a sentence of death; but it has about it little sense of impending darkness. There are, it is true, some disturbing moments—such as that when the young doctor contemplates the advantages that would follow on the demise of his mother-in-law, or that when, on the charabanc exursion, the down-trodden Miss Grundy may or may not have seen a revenant...