An elegant death

When we first meet Leonora Eyre, she speaks with "mock humility," which tells you, in two words, what a self-centred creature this middle-aged, unmarried woman is. The Sweet Dove Died spans about a year of her life.

After successfully bidding for a Victorian book of flowers, Leonora becomes light-headed and is helped out of the auction room by Humphrey Boyce and his nephew James, antique dealers. The two men become rivals for the affection of Leonora, who clearly prefers James, but the friendship develops only because the young man is willing to play along with the woman's need to be assured of her elegance and dignity.

Everything seems to go well, until Ned, James's manipulative American friend enters their lives. He exposes the characters as they truly are, the "glitter of his personality making Leonora seem no more than an ageing overdressed woman, [-] and James and Humphrey a callow young man with his pompous uncle." They are all dislikable.

The secondary characters garner a lot more sympathy. Meg had her own problematic friendship with a younger, gay man and recognised "the need to accept people as they are and to love them whatever they did." Liz "loved cats more than people," and Phoebe, with her "raw outpouring of feelings" that made James "feel so guilty."

Leonora did not make friends of women. She regarded them as "a foil for herself, particularly if, as usually happened, they were less attractive and elegant than she was." Not a pleasant person.

It's the second of Barbara Pym's books I've read. There's more humour in Excellent Women and the protagonist, 30-year-old spinster Mildred Lathbury, is more likeable. In The Sweet Dove Died, Leonora might be what Mildred would become, an older, menopausal spinster who has spent her days in splendid, narcissistic isolation. Its darkly humourous treatment of aging and death is somewhat comparable to Muriel Spark's Memento Mori. Leonora believed "there was no reason why one's death should not, in its own way, be as elegant as one's life, and one would do everything possible to make it so." It seems rather sad to dismiss other ways of living a full life for such a superficial concept.