In 1970s London, Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia work in the same office and suffer the same problem – loneliness.
Lovingly and with delightful humour, Barbara Pym conducts us through their day-to-day existence: their preoccupations, their irritations, their judgements, and – perhaps most keenly felt – their worries about having somehow missed out on life as post-war Britain shifted around them. In 1970s London, Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia work in the same office and suffer the same problem – loneliness.
I’ve enjoyed a few of Barbara Pym’s books – Excellent Women, Jane and Prudence, A Glass of Blessings and now Quartet in Autumn, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize when it was published in 1977. She had written six books between 1950 – 1961. Then she was rejected by her publisher, only to be accepted after an article in the TLS in 1977, when both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil nominated her as ‘the most underrated writer‘. It is a darker novel than the other two books of hers that I’ve read and the saddest, covering the themes of loneliness and the feeling of being isolated that can happen as one ages.
It’s a quiet novella about the everyday lives of Edwin, Letty, Marcia and Norman who have little in common, except that they have worked in the same office for many years. We never find what their jobs actually are, nor who they work for. Despite their loneliness they never met outside work and revealed little of their personal lives to each other. They are ordinary, but individual and eccentric people. They’re conscious of the way the post girl looked at them,
perhaps seeing Edwin, large and bald with a pinkish face, Norman, small and wiry with his bristly gray hair, Marcia with her general look of oddness, Letty, fluffy and faded, a Home Counties type, still making an effort with her clothes. (page 7)
Edwin is the only one who was married. He is now a widower, with a son and a grandson, and spends his spare time attending different churches. Letty is the only one who has a friend, Marjorie who is a widow. They had planned to share a cottage in the country when Letty retired. But when Marjorie announces she is getting married to a clergyman, younger than herself, that all changes and Letty is left on her own in her bedsitter.
Marcia is anti-social, avoiding contact with anyone, including the social worker who visits her after she’d had a serious operation. She was not a whole woman; some vital part of her had been taken away, though whether breast or womb was not generally known‘. She’s a hoarder, collecting empty milk bottles, storing them in her garden shed, keeping plastic bags neatly folded in a drawer and although she buys plenty of tinned food, she rarely eats any of it. Marcia thinks Norman is a ‘rather silly little man‘, who fusses over his shopping, reading out his shopping lists in the office. He doesn’t know what to do with himself when he’s not working; an angry, cynical and sarcastic man.
The characters are the main focus of the book, each one, springing to life as I read on. Pym is such a keen observer of human nature, giving the little details that bring the characters to life. The narrative alternates between each of them, following their daily lives and revealing more of their background. They are all elderly and looking forward with trepidation to what comes next after they reach retiring age. But they are isolated from each other until a crisis brings three of them together at the end of the book. It is a melancholy book, lightened at times with a little humour and ending on an optimistic note as Letty realises that ‘life still held infinite possibilities for change‘.
I enjoyed it and would like to read more of her books.
A Quartet in Autumn is my Classics Club Spin book to be read by 4th October 2026.
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.
The topic this week is Books on My Fall 2026 To-Read List. The first two books are NetGalley review copies. The rest are from my Kindle TRB list.
Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? by Judi Dench – Dame Judi Dench tells us of her life on the stage, on the screen, and, above all, behind the scenes …
The Recruit by L D Sharpe, a spy thriller, previously published by Burning Chair in 2022 as The King’s Pawn by Lucy Hooft.
The Prince and a Spy by Rory Clements – a Cambridge spy must unravel a dangerous mystery that goes all the way to the heart of the Third Reich – and the British Monarchy.
The Years by Virginia Woolf – a novel about a large upper-class London family, spanning three generations of the Pargiter family from the 1880s to the 1930s.
Maigret’s Dead Man by Georges Simenon – a series of strange phone calls leads Inspector Maigret through the Paris streets towards a man out of his depth amid a network of merciless criminals.
The Women of Arlington Hall by Jane Healey – historical fiction about female code breakers in the Cold War, in the late 1940s.
Journeys to Impossible Places: In Life and Every Adventure by Simon Reeve – nonfiction. BBC travel presenter Simon Reeve opens up about the personal story behind his most astonishing adventures – around the planet and close to home.
Today I am pleased to welcome a new weekly event. It is Friday Book Snippets, combining Book Beginnings on Friday and Friday56, co-hosted by Anne@HeadFullofBooks and Olivia at Bemused and Bookish.
Directions: Share two snippets (a sentence or short paragraph) from a) the book’s opening and b) page 56 (or another page) from the book you are currently reading. No spoilers, please.
I like this idea of using any page number for the second snippet.
One of the books I’m currently reading is It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell. This is her latest book, published in June this year.
The book begins with a Prologue:
4 June 2005
I liked the girl. She had a nice smile. She was friendly. I could tell she liked us.
Page 4:
On the eighth day of May 2026, Jane Trevally does something terrifying.
She invites an estate agent into her home.
Page 51:
She has never told Tony about the night she went home with a complete stranger on the flimsy promise of a job. She’s certain he would not judge her, not all these years later, but still, she can’t quite bring herself to let him see the desperate broken fool she’d once been.
Description from Amazon UK:
It was the night she almost died.
Newly divorced and feeling a little lost, Jane Trevally agrees to accompany a man she doesn’t know to his house in the darkest corner of Hampstead Heath.
She’s offered a drink. She steps inside.
And then she hears a scream.
Jane runs.
Twenty five years later, Jane finds herself outside the same house, this time to return a dog who’s been found near her home. A dog whose owner has just been reported missing.
A fleeting glimpse of a haunted looking woman through the window sends Jane on a mission to uncover the house’s secrets – secrets more terrifying than she could have ever imagined.
And she can’t stop thinking:
It could have been her . . .
I’ve enjoyed all of Lisa Jewell’s books that I’ve read, so it’s no surprise that this one too is promising to be just as good.
Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months have additional themes, but feel free to participate however you’d like!
Currently Jana is not assigning themes, so for September I’ve chosen to feature some of the Classic books that I have read. The links in the titles of each book go to my posts, where they exist.
The more Spell the Month books I do, the harder it becomes to use book titles beginning with the letter E as I prefer to use ones I haven’t already used in earlier posts – but I have managed it this time. I think the last three months of the year will be challenging!
S is for Silas Marner by George Eliot, set in the early years of the 19th century (Eliot was writing the book in 1861)
The story revolves around Silas Marner, a weaver living in Raveloe, a village on the brink of industrialisation. He was wrongly accused of theft and left his home town to live a lonely and embittered life in Raveloe where he became a miser, hoarding his gold and counting it each night. Until one night his life is changed by the theft of his money and a little girl who came to live with him, having been abandoned in the snow.
It took me a while to settle into George Eliot’s style of writing, with her long, long sentences – some so long I had forgotten how they had started, before I got to the end. But once my mind had adjusted to the rhythm of her writing I enjoyed this short book
E is for Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, first published in 1911 this is in contrast to some of her other books about the New York society of the 1870s to 1920s. It’s a rural tragedy of inevitable suffering and sadness that reminded me of Thomas Hardy’s books.
It’s a beautifully told tale – a tragedy, signalled right from the beginning of the book, when the unnamed narrator first saw Ethan Frome and was told he had been disfigured and crippled in a ‘smash up’, twenty four years earlier. Life had not been good to him.
I enjoyed it very much. As well as striking and memorable characters the setting is beautifully described – a ‘mute and melancholy landscape, an incarceration of frozen woe‘, in the isolated village of Starkfield (a fictional New England village). Even though Ethan Frome is a tragedy there is light to contrast the darkness, and there is love and hope set against repression and misery. I hoped the ending would be a happy one, although I knew it couldn’t be.
P is for The Power-House by John Buchan, written in 1913 when it was serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine and then published in book form in 1916.
Buchan tells a good story, even if I had little idea what the Power-House really was. It’s an international anarchist network, but who they were, what they were actually after, or how they hoped to achieve their ends was never clear to me. But I really enjoyed this book. As Stella Rimington says it has an ‘intoxicating blend of madness with scents of home and countryside.’
It has some interesting thoughts on the nature of civilisation, and of power and comments on the ‘the business of Government. When all is said, we are ruled by amateurs and the second-rate. The methods of our departments would bring any private firm to bankruptcy. The methods of Parliament – pardon me – would disgrace any board of directors.’
T is for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, first published in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell.
I read this years ago before I began blogging, so I have no record of what I thought of it, other than that I loved it.
In this sensational, hard-hitting and passionate tale of marital cruelty, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall sees a mysterious tenant, Helen Graham, unmasked not as a ‘wicked woman’ as the local gossips would have it, but as the estranged wife of a brutal alcoholic bully, desperate to protect her son. Using her own experiences with her brother Branwell to depict the cruelty and debauchery from which Helen flees, Anne Brontë wrote her masterpiece to reflect the fragile position of women in society and her belief in universal redemption, but scandalized readers of the time.
E is for East of Eden by John Steinbeck, first published in 1952.
This is the story of two family, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, whose generations helplessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. I enjoyed this beautifully written book, which begins slowly, but not as much as The Grapes of Wrath, which I thought was amazing. It’s long – too long really – and to my mind it reads like a morality tale of good versus evil. There are many parallels to the Bible stories, with surely one of the most evil characters ever in Cathy. I liked the way Steinbeck set out the moral dilemmas and gave the characters personal choice using the Hebrew word ‘timshel‘, meaning ‘thou mayest’.
On the surface this is a simple story about a family and their relationships. Fanny Price, as a child of 10 goes to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram at Mansfield Park, where as the poor relation she is not treated badly, but not as cared for or as kindly as her cousins, but more as an unpaid servant dependent on the family for her welfare – a sort of Cinderella story. But through the story, Jane Austen reveals the complicated interaction of society, shows the development of Fanny’s character and the depiction of a heroine who is good and gentle who matures throughout the novel.
It’s full of detail of everyday life, its boredom as well as its entertainments and pleasures, the balls and dinners. There is much in it about the houses and gardens, not only of the wealthy but also of the lower classes, such as Fanny’s parents home in Portsmouth – but they have servants themselves, so it is only comparative poverty. Seen mainly through Fanny’s eyes, it’s a study of morals, the damage caused by being unwanted and unloved. There is also a gentle strain of humour and satirical observations about contemporary values, and even, with Mary Crawford’s pun on ‘Rears and Vices‘, a bawdy note.
B is for Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens, first published in 1841, a murder mystery as well as a historical novel, mainly concerning the events surrounding the Gordon Riots of 1780. It’s almost a book of two parts and the dramatic second half, to my mind, more than makes up for the slow beginning which I had to read slowly and carefully.
It begins in 1775, five years before the riots as a group of customers in the Maypole Inn in the village of Chigwell, on the borders of Epping Forest and about 112 miles from London, recollect the murder of Reuben Haredale, the owner of The Warren, 22 years earlier to the day. His steward, a Mr Rudge was found months later, stabbed to death.The murderer had never been discovered. Reuben’s brother Geoffrey had lived at The Warren with his niece, Emma ever since.
From then on the book becomes much more complicated with many characters and sub-plots. There are a number of themes running through the novel – the relationship between fathers and sons, the position of authority, justice and the question of punishment for crime, and religious conflict. Dickens paints a picture of London, the dirt and poverty, the terrible condition of the roads, the perils of footpads and highwaymen which is in contrast to the countryside that still at that period surrounded London making it a cleaner, purer place to live in.
E is for Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, first published in 1952. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but it is most entertaining, subtly and gently comic. laugh-out-loud funny, but it is most entertaining, subtly and gently comic.
It’s set just after the end of the Second World War, about the everyday life of Mildred Lathbury, an unmarried woman – in other words a spinster – in her early 30s. The daughter of a clergyman she is one of those ‘excellent women’ who could be relied upon to help out at Church jumble sales, garden fêtes, to make tea when required or to make up numbers at social gatherings. She finds herself involved in the quarrel between her new neighbours, Helena and Rockingham (Rocky) Napier, a married couple who live in the flat below her, as well as in the difficult relationship between Julian Mallory, the local vicar and his unmarried sister, when he finds himself trapped by Allegra Grey, a vivacious widow when she moves into their spare room. It’s a slow-paced book but all the better because of that.
R is for A Room with a View by E M Forster. First published in 1908, this is a novella of 161 pages, a comedy of manners, satirising the manners and social conventions of Victorian/Edwardian society. It is about a young woman, Lucy Honeychurch, and her journey to self-discovery as she breaks out of the restrained culture of Edwardian England. It’s also a romance.
It begins in Florence where Lucy is staying at the Pensione Bertolini, with her older cousin and chaperone Charlotte Bartlett. They meet two other guests, a Mr Emerson and his son George who are not bound by the conventions of the day and Charlotte considers they are ill-bred. But Lucy is attracted by the Emersons’ free thinking ideas. They spend time in Florence visiting various locations including the Santa Croce church, the Piazza Della Signoria and the San Miniato church, with its beautiful facade, and take a trip into the hills.
The second half of the book takes place in England at Lucy’s home at Windy Corner where we meet the rest of her family and Lucy has to decide between the insufferable Cecil and the unconventional George.
This is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate atBooks Are My Favourite and Best. This month we are starting with either with your book group’s current selection or if you’re not in a book group, start with the book that you’re currently reading.
I’m not in a book group so I’m starting with the book I’m currently reading, which is The Vanishing Act by Sarah Ward. It’s the third book in the Mallory Dawson Crime Thriller series. I enjoyed the first two books and so far (I’ve read over half the book) I’m really enjoying this one too.
This is about a missing family. They disappeared from the holiday cottage, they were renting in a remote part of Wales. Apparently they had left in a hurry whilst making sandwiches for a picnic and leaving a kettle still steaming on the Aga.
Just Another Missing Person by Gillian McAllister, a book that totally gripped and baffled me. Olivia just disappeared from a dead-end alley without being seen coming back out. The investigating police officer is DCI Julia Day, a detective with a passion for solving things, piecing things together and helping people to get to the truth. But she has come up against what seems to be an impossible crime.
The House of Lost Whispers by Jenni Keer, a review copy, which also contains a character called Olivia. I don’t often read romance or fantasy novels but this book has both elements and it’s also historical fiction set before, during and after the First World War. It explores loss and grief, family life, friendship and romantic relationships, as well as the devastating and horrific events of the First World War.
Next is another review copy, The Spy in the Archive by Gordon Corera. It’s nonfiction about Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to Britain in 1992. Mitrokhin, a quiet, introverted and determined man, was a reluctant defector, because whilst he loved Russia he came to hate the KGB and the Soviet system. It is a remarkable book about a remarkable man; an in-depth account, that took me weeks to read as it’s not a book to read quickly. It’s both fascinating and informative.
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris, historical fiction about the Dreyfus Affair. In his Author’s Note Harris writes that his aim in writing this novel was to ‘retell the true story of the Dreyfus affair‘, describing it as ‘perhaps the greatest political scandal and miscarriage of justice in history, which in the 1890s came to obsess France an ultimately the entire world‘. What follows is a chillingly dark, and realistic novel of conspiracy and espionage.
Miss Austen by Gillian Hornby – the untold story of the most important person in Jane’s life – her sister Cassandra. After Jane’s death, Cassandra lived alone and unwed, spending her days visiting friends and relations and quietly, purposefully working to preserve her sister’s reputation. It’s very well researched, a novel that held my attention from the beginning right to the end. A definite 4.5 star book.
Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey. Miss Pym was pleased and flattered to be invited to Leys Physical Training College to give a lecture on psychology. But then there was a ’nasty accident‘. This is not a conventional crime fiction novel. It’s a psychological study focussing on the characters, their motivation and analysis of facial characteristics. It looks at the consequences of what people do and say and, as Miss Pym discovers who she thinks is responsible, it also looks at how much a person should intervene, or as one of the characters tells her, ‘Do the obvious right thing, and let God dispose.’ Miss Pym agonises over her decision, was she really going to condemn someone to death?
Making this chain into a very loosely linked circle I went from crime fiction to crime fiction, with historical fiction, non fiction and spy stories in between.
Next month (October 3, 2026), we’ll start with Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Life of M.
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.
The topic this week is Books With Nationalities In The Title (e.g. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Mexican Gothic, An American Mariage, etc.) (submitted by Cathy @WhatCathyReadNext)
This was harder than I thought it would be! I’ve read all of them but some of them are books I read before I had this blog.
