Quartet in Autumn

by Barbara Pym, Alexander McCall Smith (Introduction)

With an introduction by Alexander McCall Smith

One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.

In 1970s London Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia work in the same office and suffer the same problem - loneliness. Lovingly and with delightful humour, 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.

Deliciously, blackly funny and full of obstinate optimism, Quartet in Autumn shows Barbara Pym's sensitive artistry at its most sparkling. A classic from one of Britain's most loved and highly acclaimed novelists, its world is both extraordinary and familiar, revealing the eccentricities of everyday life.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, British Literature, Literary Fiction, 20th Century, Novels, Book Club

194 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 29, 1978

About the author

People know British writer Barbara Pym for her comic novels, such as Excellent Women (1952), of English life.

After studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, Barbara Pym served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. From 1950 to 1961, she published six novels, but her 7th was declined by the publisher due to a change in the reading public's tastes.

The turning point for Pym came with a famous article in the 1975 Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence over a period of many years. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. Another novel, The Sweet Dove Died, previously rejected by many publishers, was subsequently published to critical acclaim, and several of her previously unpublished novels were published after her death.

Pym worked at the International African Institute in London for some years, and played a large part in the editing of its scholarly journal, Africa, hence the frequency with which anthropologists crop up in her novels. She never married, despite several close relationships with men, notably Henry Harvey, a fellow Oxford student, and the future politician, Julian Amery. After her retirement, she moved into Barn Cottage at Finstock in Oxfordshire with her younger sister, Hilary, who continued to live there until her death in February 2005. A blue plaque was placed on the cottage in 2006. The sisters played an active role in the social life of the village.

Several strong themes link the works in the Pym "canon", which are more notable for their style and characterisation than for their plots. A superficial reading gives the impression that they are sketches of village or suburban life, with excessive significance being attached to social activities connected with the Anglican church (in particular its Anglo-Catholic incarnation). However, the dialogue is often deeply ironic, and a tragic undercurrent runs through some of the later novels, especially Quartet in Autumn and The Sweet Dove Died.

Reviews

[Magrat Ajostiernos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probablemente ya mi novela favorita de la Pym. Probablemente.
Y es que también es la más triste y nostálgica de todas las que he leído, pero sin perder su chispa ni su ironía.
La historia sigue a cuatro compañeros de trabajo a punto de jubilarse que se encuentran muy solos (tres solteros y un viudo) y muestra la vida de estas personas que pierden el sentido al perder también el trabajo.
Ambientada en los años 70 también enseña ese choque generacional, la incomprensión del mundo moderno o la juventud, pero especialmente la dificultad para los pensionistas (especialmente las mujeres) de salir adelante económica y socialmente, y cómo parece que para el resto del mundo con la jubilación te conviertes directamente en un despojo social por no tener ninguna utilidad real.
En fin, como digo un libro triste y melancólico que me ha llegado especialmente e incluso a pesar del tema consiguió hacerme sonreír una y otra vez.

[Julie G · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started my first Barbara Pym novel just as fever set in, and I'm always a little fascinated by the journey that happens when real fever dreams play out over a fictional story.

I have a weird fever response. I only know that now, after having lived long enough to observe family and friends sleep peacefully through multiple fevers and communicate back to me that the world, for them, does not turn into flashing lights, repeating pieces of music and non-stop snippets of dialogue that make one positively nauseous.

For me, the first day of reading Ms. Pym's last completed novel was followed by a night of fever dreams, which included Chaka Khan, in all her 80s glory, waving her arms, and singing to me, over and over again, “Through the fire, through whatever, come what may. . .”

I do love me some Chaka Khan, but even I don't wish to hear one line of one of her songs play out for eight hours.

Yet. . . day two of my illness brought what felt like a similar repeating pattern by day, with this novel presenting to me a world so puny, it seemed almost absurd. Characters doing the same boring things, every day, rinse, repeat.

I've never read anything of Barbara Pym's before now, and I honestly know nothing else about this writer, other than her official website presents photographs of her that had me yawning. The montage included (but was not limited to) typewriters, cups of tea, ugly sweaters and smiling pictures with female “chums.”

I don't want to jump to any conclusions, as I respect the nuts and bolts of her technical writing, but I'm going to be really honest here and share with you that if you're going to hand me four protagonists in their 60s (who make up the “quartet”), and tell me that three of them are lifelong virgins, and one of them is a widower-turned-eunuch, you'd better tell me something else, and quick.

Like: does one of them have a dead body buried in the yard? (Answer: yes, but it's a cat that died of natural causes).

I nearly died of boredom from this read, and I found it borderline preposterous that any writer would go so far out of her way to make every character in this story this ridiculously dull. So dull, I could find no edge, nothing to hold on to, as a reader.

My fever dreams are fading now (though a decent sinus headache remains). I see, though, that the fire goddess is still hungry. Here, Chaka goddess. . . take this book for kindling, and make your fire roar.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barbara Pym has a unique voice, very quiet and subtle, very astute. She is a humorist who gets to the heart of her subject and finds the sadness beneath the laughter. Watch out, she seems to say, because before you realize it, the laugh is on you.

For each one of us could be (or might become) Edwin, Norman, Letty or Marcia. They are ordinary people who have reached their sixties and, for various reasons, find themselves alone. Their main focus in life has been their jobs, but that is about to end. Being co-workers is what binds them to one another, and the thread seems very tenuous, but even with the two ladies retiring, the four seem to find the thread is strong enough to resist breaking.

I loved this book particularly because it addresses the problems we find, so unexpectedly, when we reach a certain age. It is almost like those formative years, when the world is before you and you are trying to decide what path you want to take, with the difference being that we are all trying to figure out how we can best see the end of the trip we are on.

The wit here is subtle, but sometimes sharp, like a stick of butter with a knife hidden in it. You laugh, and then you realize you have just been cut, as when Letty and Marcia are treated to their shabby little retirement party.

If the two women feared that the coming of this date might give some clue to their ages, it was not an occasion for embarrassment because nobody else had been in the least interested, both of them having long ago reached ages beyond any kind of speculation.

This quartet is painted in grays. They blend into the background for those around them, they are superfluous to the world at large, they are so insignificant that when they leave their jobs it isn’t required that they be replaced, and yet Pym shows us that they are individuals, with lives and hopes, searching for happiness and sometimes just for an uncondescending recognition that they are there.

Just a Note: I thought I had read Barbara Pym before, but couldn’t remember what book I had read, so I went to my book list to find that I have six of her books in my Kindle library waiting and yet had never read a single one. Awfully glad I liked this one!

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

My driving instructor used to say that he wanted me to drive in such a manner that if there was a cup of tea sitting on the roof of the car there wouldn’t be a drop spilled by the time we came back, and this novel does just that. Its hardcore gentleness is a mask for a melancholy swandive into the grim realities of being old and useless and lonely and on the way out.

These four old codgers in London in the 1970s, none of them have any family or friends, they work together in an office doing virtually nothing for an unnamed organisation while a fine layer of dust sifts gently over their lives and having completed their waxing decades ago, if they ever did wax, they are for sure waning now. The two women retire partway through the story and the whole thing is about all the things they then don’t do, and just a few tiny things they do. We are very familiar with this kind of soft, hushed comedy here in Britain. It turns up (beautifully) in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, (not so beautifully) in How it All Began by Penelope Lively, and more recently in The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling (that one modulates from gentle to less gentle comedy and finally to lurid tragedy. But it starts in Barbara Pym territory). And it can be seen in a zillion sitcoms. And in the funnier films of Mike Leigh.

Also, Barbara Pym very deliberately turns this novel into a repository of cliched, worn-out, tedious, tiresome well known English phrases and sayings – her characters have their whole lives been prisoners of convention in deed and in thought, so they come out endlessly with stuff like

That’s about the size of it
Beggars can’t be choosers
Pushing the boat out
Nice work if you can get it
They’ll hardly thank us for that
Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb
It’s almost like old times
One is at a slight disadvantage
Thank you for nothing
And so on, and on.

I like my comedy to have a little more grit, bite, nastiness and and bile than this, but I will say that the sense of teetering on the edge of eternity, the uneasy apprehension of the thin membrane that separates sanity from chaotic horror, drifts through these unremarkable scenes like poison gas.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was recommended to me by various bloggers and certainly lived up to their praise. Originally published in 1977, this was Pym’s seventh novel out of nine; she died in 1980. It’s about four London office workers, all sixty-somethings who are partnerless and don’t have, or at least don’t live with, any immediate family members. We never learn what they do in this office; in fact, Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia don’t seem to be filling much of a need, especially given the fact that the two old girls aren’t replaced when they retire midway through the novel.

For as long as they’ve been working together, the four haven’t given in to the usual human impulse to know and be known. At first there doesn’t seem to be much to know about them; with only one or two shorthand facts apiece it’s a minor challenge to tell them apart. Widower Edwin’s hobby is attending Anglican services; Norman lives off fried food and visits his brother-in-law in hospital; Letty lives in a boarding house and has a friend in the countryside; Marcia has had a mastectomy and hoards tinned food and empty milk bottles.

But for all of them a line applied to Letty holds true: “It was a comfortable enough life, if a little sterile, perhaps even deprived.” Especially after her retirement, Letty knows “she must never give the slightest hint of loneliness or boredom, the sense of time hanging heavy.”

From what I’d heard about Pym, I might have expected a lighthearted satire about country manners and Anglican vicars. Perhaps that’s a fair assessment of some of her earlier books? But this is much darker, and the humor always has a bitter edge:

When Marcia finds a plastic bag labeled “To avoid danger of suffocation keep this wrapper away from babies and children,” the narrator adds, “They could have said from middle-aged and elderly persons too, who might well have an irresistible urge to suffocate themselves.”

Offered the option of moving into a care home, Letty thinks “better to lie down in the wood under the beech leaves and bracken and wait quietly for death.”

Overall it’s quite a melancholy little book, a warning against letting your life become too small and private. Yet the last line, remarkably, is a sudden injection of optimism: “it made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change.” I’d recommend this to readers who have enjoyed Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor.

Originally published with images on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

That's an excellent story about old-age retirement habits. Reading a somewhat ironic painting is effortless, but fortunately, I did not find myself in this novel.
The vast retirement debate about how to spend all this free time is necessary to take advantage of reading, but that is not enough to allow us to remain sociable.

[سـارا · Rating 4 out of 5]

خیلی دوسش داشتم؛ شاید بهترین توصیف از انزوا و تنهایی بود، تنهایی ناشی از بالا رفتن سن و گذر زمان که میتونه خیلی از آدم‌ها رو درگیر خودش کنه.
بنظرم باربارا پیم در عین ساده بودن، به شدت عمیق و ملموس مینویسه، امیدوارم بیدگل باز هم ازش ترجمه کنه.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been hearing good things about Barbara Pym for a while, and this short novel, which earned her only Booker shortlisting, seemed like the obvious place to start. It is gentle, poignant and sharply witty. The leading characters are all of a certain age (around 60) and single, and at the start of the book they are all sharing a London office where they do clerical work.

The plot revolves around the contrasting retirements of the two women Letty and Marcia. Letty lives in a shared house and Marcia has inherited a house. Marcia is recovering from a mastectomy, and is the most eccentric of the four, though the two men Edwin and Norman are not far behind. Marcia is a hoarder, and due to fears of another war she keeps a collection of hundreds of milk bottles in a garden shed, and a cupboard full of canned food, which, being almost anorexic, she never touches. Letty has a friend in the country who she planned to move in with, but who is now engaged to a much younger vicar. Edwin spends most of his free time attending church services and events.

I found this book a very enjoyable read, and would recommend it.

[Nick Grammos · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think Barbara Pym needs to be more widely read. She writes well, and the ideas in this book left me thinking about time and ageing for some time after.

Four people approaching retirement age have only one obvious thing in common, they all work in a back office of a little unnamed bureaucracy. Their work is largely irrelevant. There is no one else, just them in this office, though there is a wider office all around them. Now and then a perky young woman pops in and out with mail. She’s not much liked. It all feels like they’re out to pasture. That of course is the second obvious thing they have in common.

And early on, the language is grim:

“Now the fire was sinking as it was for all of them, but was she, or any of them, ready to depart?”

Discussions about recent news items aren’t much better, laced with a little gallows humour:


”The chance of being found dead of hypothermia.”

It’s a time of uncertainty when even free time doesn’t offer much hope:

”Most of Norman's holiday was spent in this idle and profitless way. The truth is he didn’t really know what to do with himself when he wasn’t working”

Letty’s life can be described as having passed by without milestones or events of significance:

”Love was an experience she had never experienced.”

And she has always lived in the shadow of her friend Marjorie who lives a more glamorous life in a lovely little village.

Pym is ruthless at times in reminding us of death’s ever presence:

”So often now Letty came upon reminders of her own mortality or, regarded less poetically, the different stages towards death.”

Staging the story is one of Pym's things. Divided into 24 chapters reflecting the hours of the day, time pops up everywhere, seasons, calendars etc. One character, Edwin, is a kind of religious nomad moving from church to church recalling and seeking out the best services for each saint’s day, the assumption, lent etc. Religion is in decline yet his quest goes on.

Lives are measured by the length of lunch hours during office days, the timing of retirement, length of grass, the accumulation of milk bottles and tinned food.

At the exact half way point, change happens between chapters 12 and 13. Someone retires [not exactly a spoiler in a story about old people].

The whole thing sounds gloomy, but it’s so well written, so balanced and engaging in its language, that you don't get caught up in the maudlin eventuality of human decline, but enjoy having a little peak at the minds and preoccupations of a few people facing the long slow decline. It hums along in a steady, almost jaunty way, episodic, shifting between the four main characters on a particular subject so we get multiple points of view, shifting between narrative action and thoughts seamlessly. We’re never reading a dull patch in a set of obviously dull lives. Nothing lasts long. There is a series of things that must be explored and played out.

There’s some quiet, quotidian humour. When Marcia retires, on her first Monday she’s described by this little pearl of an image:

”she changed the dress she had put on for her old Saturday morning skirt and a crumpled blouse which needed ironing, but there was nobody to notice it or to criticise and no doubt the warmth of her body would soon press out the creases.”

And black humour:

” ‘I think just a cup of tea…’ There’s something to be said for a cup of tea and a comfortable chat about crematoria.”

This is a little gem and Pym is a fine writer well worth chasing more of her works for the joy of the prose.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Father G's coming in for a bite before the PCC meeting and I'll do one of my specials - baked beans on toast with a poached egg on top.'

This is Pym at her bleakest but I'm not sure I see this book as about aging and retirement as most reviews seem to: to me, this is about four people who have always chosen, consciously or not, to live small, narrow, unfriended and joyless lives. Only Edwin was once married ('he supposed his wife Phyllis had once had breasts but he could not remember that they had been at all like this' - as he looks at Playboy-type mags at the station) and has an adult child he only sees at Christmas; the others are all single and only Letty has a friend, one who uses her as a companion when she chooses and dumps her unceremoniously when she finds a man.

That's not to say, of course, that everyone has to be married: but these are loveless lives, without interests or passions. It's not that this quartet find themselves suddenly socially 'useless' because of their age - they've been like that all their lives. And Marcia and Letty are only in their late fifties, hardly geriatric even in the 1970s, surely? At least one eighty year old puts Letty to shame in terms of energy and will.

Rather than age, the underlying theme for me is a kind of limp lack of engagement and self-denial. Norman and Edwin delude themselves that they have significance, but Edwin's obtrusive Christianity hides a complete disregard for other people and we are repeatedly shown his relief as he dismisses people from his mind, preferring to settle down with Reader's Digest than put himself out for Marcia, for example. Norman enjoys being pompous and enraged, whether that's ranting about 'the blacks' or how much TV people watch - he's the archetypal Mr Angry of The Telegraph/Mail fame.

Letty, who could so nearly be a friend of Mildred from Excellent Women, is instead deadened through habitual timidity and withdrawal: when a woman tries to talk to her in a cafe, Letty snubs her and scurries away; when her Nigerian landlord's wife invites her for dinner, she refuses and then moves out. It's a neat contrast to Mildred who throws herself in with her new neighbours and anthropologists, widening her world rather than closing it down as Letty does.

Pym indicates the flatness of these three lives through the way they all speak in platitudes and dead phrases: troubles always come in threes; nice work if you can get it. Even a gesture towards a reunion lunch is underpinned by awkward interactions and a secret payment by luncheon vouchers, ending with relief they don't have to do this again soon. They sort of cling to each other to pretend they have friends, rather than face the reality of their essential solitude.

Marcia is, perhaps, the most searing portrait from Pym: recovering from breast cancer, obsessing over her surgeon, she is anorexic and obsessive, clinging to awful rituals that bound and control her world: a shed full of empty milk bottles, drawers full of plastic bags organised by size, cupboards full of tinned food she will never eat. And not one of her work colleagues can recognize either her mental health issues or her deterioration through the book: they knowingly smirk about her oddness and repeat that she's never had a big appetite as she wastes away in front of them she's just six stone when she finally collapses and is taken to hospital where she dies. It's quite an indictment - though a polite one - from Pym.

It's hard to express, given the above, how funny this book is: not in the sunny way of Pym's earlier books but in the sharp, neat, skewering way of Jane Austen. There are distressing things happening and no real escape from the bleakness but Pym's subtle observations, cutting vision and ability to show us these people without overt comment is staggering.

[JimZ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read ‘Excellent Women’ a couple of days ago and gave it 3 stars and not 4 because it sorta dragged after the halfway point. For this novel, I give 3.5 stars...it held my attention throughout, although probably as with most Barbara Pym books, not a whole lot happens.

I liked reading this novel. I read this 25 years ago (dammit, I am getting old...oh wait, I am old) ...and gave it a B+ so at least with this read, I am consistent. My assessment of the novel at its end: funny and sad at the same time.

It was somewhat of a sad read...two men and two women in their 60s, and the women retire from their jobs halfway through the book and the men are close to retirement. It is not clear what these people do...they occupy an office together and the company has no plans to replace them once they leave the employ of the company, so it appears their jobs are no longer necessary and/or are being automated.

They are by no means a close-knit bunch. None of them sincerely like the others. They just get along, and that’s about it. All of them have rather lonely lives...two have homes and two have bedsit arrangements, and they all live alone.

Marcia is the saddest of the four. As far as I can tell she dies from anorexia nervosa. She always ate like a bird, and I guess that eventually caught up with her. A social worker as well as her new next-door neighbors try to befriend her, but to no avail. She is a hoarder. She hoards hundreds of glass milk bottles in the shed in her unkempt and weed-infested back yard. She does this in case there is another war, because in WWII in England, when people had ration coupons and such, if you lost your milk bottles, then you lost your allotment of milk.

Marcia, in her free time, and she has lots of it, does such mundane and meaningless (at least to me) things as arranging plastic bags in a drawer in her house based on their shapes and sizes. And she kept the plastic bags in a drawer as opposed to leaving them out somewhere in the house because...’there was a note printed on them which read ‘To avoid danger of suffocation keep this wrapper away from babies and children’. They could have said from middle-aged and elderly persons too, who might well have an irresistible urge to suffocate themselves.’ 😯

Note:
• This novel was originally rejected by Hamish Hamilton in 1976. Then there was an article in the Times Literary Supplement that asked contributors to name over-and underrated writers of the past 75 years. Pym as the only author to get two mentions in the latter category. After that was the re-emergence of Pym on the literary scene (Quartet in Autumn was published by Macmillan in 1977) and no doubt there are many Barbara Pym fans because most of her earlier oeuvre from 1950 to 1961 was re-issued by both E.P. Dutton Publishing and Virago Modern Classics.
• The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977. (Staying On by Paul Scott won.)

Reviews
• https://patricktreardon.com/book-revi...
• https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2022...
• https://shereadsnovels.com/2018/04/21...

[Wanda Pedersen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This little novel probably appealed to me so strongly because these four people are in the zone that I currently inhabit—they are reaching retirement age and wondering if they are ready for this next phase of life.

I’m currently flailing around, trying to determine if I have the financial resources necessary to pull the plug, because like Letty and Marcia, I never married and I’m now responsible for my own future. But how times have changed—I’m no longer at the mercy of the government pension to determine how my future unfolds, and I’ve been able to plan better things for myself.

Still, I understand the uncertainties of retirement. How will my days be structured? What activities will fill my time? Will I still be able to afford many of the activities that I currently enjoy? Poverty in old age is a perennial worry, something that has soaked into my bones. I think single women of my vintage have a horror of becoming bag ladies and having to eat cat food. Financial advisors rarely understand this worry—they don’t live on the same financial edge that many older single women do.

I remember when one of my friends was looking for housing for her elderly mother in the U.K. She told me she looked at too many places where “You wouldn’t want to leave your coat, let alone your mother.” I think we’ve all heard horror stories of homes for the elderly where they are abused and/or neglected. The problem of where to live is the big one. Does one stay at home and go odd, like Marcia? Or take small steps towards taking control, like Letty?

I’m hoping to be in the Letty camp—once I’m retired, I hope to start looking around for the next living situation and plan out the next number of years. I think most of us still feel younger than we are in our own heads—referring to myself as elderly seems ridiculous to me, but I’m sure I seem that way to the younger people in my life. Still, I need to get planning adventures for the post-work phase of life and this book has been both a comfort and an inspiration for that.

[Antoinette · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the fourth novel I have read by Barbara Pym and I would say it is her most melancholic book. There is still some of her dark humour, but overall it is more of a story that made me reflect on life, and the idea of life passing you by.

We meet Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia- they all are in their 60’s and have worked together in a non de script job for a while. They are not especially attached. We see them all together in the office and then follow them individually. They are all lonely but loathe to reach out or even acknowledge that fact. I got the feeling they all expected more out of life, but this is the life they have.

Marcia was the one who seemed to struggle the most. She was very idiosyncratic in her thoughts and in her actions. She saved plastic bags and organized them perfectly. She collected milk bottles and kept them immaculately. Yet her home was in a state. She had had a “major” operation, so social services were trying to help her out, but she refused their help. She was who she was and there was no way she would ever accept interference.

Both women reached the age of retirement, so they left ahead of the men. How were they going to fill their lives?

“But she (Letty)still kept to her rules- one did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning…”

Much as they were not close at work, a bond still existed between the four and how it evolved gave me hope.

Ms. Pym wrote this, her penultimate novel, a few years before she died. She never married as Letty and Marcia had not. Did she experience this feeling of wondering what her life was all about or was she content?

I think there are lots of seniors who are alone in the world. The message to me was how important maintaining friendships and connections are as one ages, as well as having interests to keep you busy. There is nothing worse than feeling lonely in a world full of people.

This was a “heavier” novel by Ms. Pym, but one I truly appreciated for the insights on aging well.

Published: 1977

[Katie Lumsden · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very good novel - poignant and solemn and smart all at once. The way Pym explores loneliness, and the skill with which she paints her characters, make it an impressive and important book.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5


With the characters' ages being what they are (and as I approach the same), I'm appreciative that the book is not called Quartet in Winter.

*

A P.S. to my perhaps too terse "review" above: In the past I compared Pym to Jane Austen and Muriel Spark; this book, with its missed connections (and unable-to-be-spoken sentiments), reminded me of Penelope Fitzgerald.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There was nothing particularly remarkable about them except their remoteness from any kind of life.”

On the cover of my edition, there’s a quote from the society magazine Harper’s Queen: “Written with the wit and style of a twentieth-century Jane Austen.” This may be true but it is SO misleading. Readers expecting the feel of a JA novel will be sorely disappointed, I fear. I wouldn’t say it’s a twentieth century Jane Austen, but rather a Jane Austen for the AARP set--if Jane was writing, instead of about young people in love, about old people becoming doddery misfits.

I don’t mean that in any ageist way. I am becoming a doddery misfit myself. It’s just true that we can develop a sort of bewildered way of looking at the world, because we don’t fit in like we used to. And some of us are definitely getting quirkier. This is a story about four such characters, two men and two women, all single and living alone. They work together, and are approaching retirement.

Office relationships--another thing I am very familiar with! When you spend day-in and day-out with people you did not choose, odd bonds develop. You get to know people you wouldn’t otherwise know, and know them really well.

So this is the story of Edwin and Norman and Letty and Marcia, an unusual crew doing some unspecified work, sitting together in a room all day, sometimes lunching together at the library or the British Museum, but otherwise not involved in each other’s lives. But what happens in this kind of situation is you are involved, whether you want to be or not.

It is definitely written from a 1977 perspective, and I was reminded how long ago that was. But though I did often wonder why this weird book was considered Pym’s best, in the end, if maybe not until the end, I loved it.

“All gone, that time, those people … Letty woke up and lay for some time meditating on the strangeness of life, slipping away like this.”

[Roya · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 ⭐️

مطمئنا همون‌طور که مشخصه، از روی اسمش قضاوت کردم و جزو لیست پاییزه‌م قرارش دادم ولی اصلا وایب پاییزی نداشت که بخوام پیشنهاد بدم که تا پاییز تموم نشده برید سراغش.
در واقع کتاب هیچ ویژگی برجسته‌ای که بشه بهش اشاره کرد، نداشت. صرفا یک روایت ساده از زندگی روزمره و روابط چهار همکاره. آدم‌هایی که شاید منتظر تلنگر و اتفاقی هستند که زندگی‌شون رو تغییر بده و از یکنواختی در بیاره. آدم‌هایی که منتظر زندگی کردنن.
کرکترپردازی ضعیفی داشت و نویسنده روی کرکتر خاصی فوکوس نمی‌کرد و شاید همین ارتباط گرفتن با داستان رو سخت می‌کرد. احساسات عمیق و داستان کنجکاوی‌برانگیزی هم نداشت. در معمولی‌ترین حالتی بود که یک داستان می‌تونست باشه.

[Katya]

[Barbara Pym Society]


"O (...) quarto era bastante agradável, escassamente mobilado, o que era bom, e havia um lavatório com água quente e fria, como Edwin dissera. Letty sentia-se como uma governanta num romance vitoriano ao chegar a um novo emprego, mas aqui não haveria crianças, nem nenhuma perspectiva de uma ligação romântica com o viúvo dono da casa ou com um atraente filho da familia."
84

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A forma desapaixonada como Barbara Pym vê a vida é algo difícil de digerir.
A noção rigorosa que tem da solidão (física e emocional), das excentricidades, das limitações dos seus personagens torna as suas narrativas ao mesmo tempo trágicas, lentas e tristemente cómicas.
Neste livro em particular, a forma como pequenos nadas se tornam o eixo central de uma vida, é talvez o detalhe mais interessante.
Agora uma coisa é certa, o facto de nós nos identificarmos ou não com as posturas que tomam os heróis desta história pode, sem dúvida, fazer ou desfazer toda a leitura.

Norman, Letty, Edwin e Marcia são os quatro e únicos motores de interesse em todas as duzentas páginas de Quarteto no Outono. E isto é dizer muito quando "...'eles' os reformados...", como se lhes referem na narrativa, são aquilo que apelidaríamos de gente de classe indefinida, sem interesses pessoais e sem família. E a somar a isto, um grupinho de gente difícil, cheia de peculiaridades e nenhum interesse em encetar relações de proximidade entre si. Dai, embora os quatro gravitem num mesmo espaço, não se conhecem uns aos outros melhor do que nós conhecemos a senhora que nos vende o pão na padaria, são perfeitos estranhos que convivem num mesmo espaço até que algum cataclismo os obrigue a uma aproximação forçada.

No entanto, não me parece que a intenção da autora seja unicamente a de debater as questões da velhice ou da reforma. Os seus personagens têm normalmente em comum esta coisa desagradável que é a solidão, independentemente de serem mais ou menos jovens. E, mais que isso, há sempre uma sombra de declínio (um declínio quase imperial) na obra de Pym.
Ultimamente, a autora analisa as separações que fragmentam a sociedade do seu tempo e essas separações não são apenas as da idade, mas da classe social, da etnicidade, do género - ad aeternum.
A marginalidade dos seus personagens é também um factor curioso: os heróis de Pym são mulheres e homens comuns, absolutamente banais, muitas vezes, mesmo, pouco amáveis. E o seu mundo trivial reforça o sentido de comicidade que faz o estilo da autora.

E Barbara Pym tem outra excelente qualidade, é uma escritora compassiva, que não tece julgamentos, limitando-se a descrever os defeitos e virtudes dos seus personagens. Os seus narradores surgem sempre à margem da crítica, não tecem considerações de valor ou de moral. Estão ali apenas para afastar as cortinas que nos dão a ver criaturas humanas.

No todo, não são livros inesquecíveis (para mim), mas são leituras que faço com bastante interessante, um interesse quase antropológico - aliás, a sua obra frequentes vezes é dessa forma apelidada.

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"Bem, agora viera depressa, estava aqui [o primeiro dia da reforma]. (...) Marcia levou para baixo a bandeja que usara para o primeiro chá da manhã, mas esqueceu-se da chávena sobre o toucador, onde ficaria por alguns dias, o depósito do chá leitoso coalhando por ter azedado. Como não ia para o escritório, substituiu o vestido que trazia pela saia velha das manhãs de sábado e uma blusa amarrotada que previsava de ferro, mas não havia ninguém para reparar ou para criticar, e sem dúvida que o calor do corpo em breve alisaria as rugas."
114

[Connie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Quartet in Autumn" is a novel about four single work colleagues who are each lonely and close to retirement age. They perform some clerical work in a London office, and won't be replaced when they retire (probably because computers are taking over many jobs in the 1970s). Author Barbara Pym combines the melancholy with gentle humor as the four coworkers each take a different approach to aging.

After one of them has a health crisis, the other three reach out to support each other even though they have little in common. They are no longer just letting life go by, but taking the time and effort to decide where they each want to spend their retirement years. Each character is sad and vulnerable in some way, but they are also survivors in a changing world. The author brings these characters to life in this sad, humorous, honest look at aging and loneliness.

[Cynthia · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Quartet” is the first of her books written after a hiatus. It was also written after her own breast cancer surgery. It’s much darker than her earlier novels. Her trademark sly humor is still intact though there’s a gallows feel to it. The story is about four 60 something work colleagues, two men and two women, right on the cusp of their retirement. (Pym too had recently left her long time editing job due to ill health.) As always the characters are utterly unique. Norman is an angry man, barely able to contain his rage to expected levels. Edwin, a widower, is a church hopper structuring his time around the ecclesiastical calendar, always searching for the church with the best service. Letty is a gentle soul who’s never married but has one close female friend from her youth. Marcia is an anomaly. Lost, odd, obsessive, suffering from ill health. When Marcia and Letty retire the four are separated but events keep bringing them together and not always for happy events.

I love Pym’s subtly, the blind allies she leads us down, the insights you have to suss out for yourself, the unexpected out of place humor, the heart tugs that don’t spill over into schmaltz…but just barely. I think in “Quartet” she’s at her best though, if you’ve read her earlier books, it might jolt you with its darker tone.

[Lynne King · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so taken with Barbara Pym. She mysteriously manages to touch a part of my soul that even I cannot reach.

I wondered why she chose this title of Autumn? I believe that the following quote that I discovered is quite apt:

"Autumn is the season after summer, when leaves fall from trees. It's also the season when the days get shorter and colder, and everything turns brown and drab, but people like it anyway, for the cocoa and cider, probably."

I'm not so sure about the cider!

This book is so unlike Barbara Pym's previous books as I found that they sparkled. This is "darker". Now whether it was due to her forthcoming death, three years after this book was published in 1977, I don't know but the feeling of regret seems to permeate the book, although the ending quite negates this with a very positive and upbeat feeling.

The story is not at all exciting. In fact it is rather dull as it concerns the lives of four individuals in their sixties who work together in London - Edwin Braithwaite, a widower with a daughter in Beckenham, who has his own house, and is constantly looking for church services to attend, followed by a drink afterwards with his friend Father G; Norman (the only one without a surname) who is cynical, sarcastic and lives in a bedsitter; Marcia Ivory who had been married and lives in her own home with a most absurd penchant for collecting milk bottles, furiously cleaning them and leaving them in her garden shed, with an extreme attachment to her surgeon, Mr Strong even to the extent that she goes to see where he lives. But the heroine of this work, if you can call her that, is the self-effacing Letty Crowe, who had left her bedsit as Nigerians, religious ones at that, had purchased her house with the tenants included and so thanks to Edwin had come across Mrs. Pope, a rather cantankerous eighty or so year old woman. In addition, is Marjorie, a friend of Letty, who hopes that they will live together in the country when Letty retires.

Now you may not believe that this is a very exciting book but it is. How interest can be sustained with four individuals who have been working together in clerical positions for several years in London (close to the British museum and Library - where they all go, not together, from time to time) and you just don't know what kind of company they work for or what work they do. In fact when Letty and Marcia retire, at their farewell speech even the deputy managing director did not know what they did. As a result, their jobs were nor replaced and luckily for Edwin and Norman, they could spread all of their work and food over the former Letty's and Marcia's places.

What is so delightful about this book is that Barbara Pym gives excitement and life to what basically would be thoroughly boring existences.

I so loved the poetry/comments that are scattered throughout. Norman makes the comment on a rather sad occasion:

"Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,
Into the grave the great Queen dashes."

All in all a pleasure to read, even though it was somewhat "dark". I felt as if I were entering into the soul of Barbara Pym with all of her expectations, be they of now, another world or afterwards. Wonderful.

[Nigeyb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quartet in Autumn (1977) is the first book I have read by Barbara Pym. I really enjoyed it. It reminded me of the wonderful Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor. Both books deal with old age and retirement.

In this instance four work colleagues, two women and two men, are all coming up to retirement. Each character is beautifully developed and we get to know them as individuals and as a collective.

Quartet in Autumn is melancholic but also curiously uplifting and sometimes slyly humorous. It's always perfectly observed and credible, capturing as it does the messiness and difficulties of everyday life, and the challenges of ageing for those without the support of other family members.

By the end of this short novel I felt I had really got to know all four characters, and was sad to bid them farewell despite none of them being remotely exceptional or charismatic. Something I find very impressive. Looking foward to reading more Barbara Pym.

5/5




The blurb...

Set in 1970s London, it’s about Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia who work in the same office and suffer the same problem - loneliness. Lovingly and with delightful humour, 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.

Deliciously, blackly funny and full of obstinate optimism, Quartet in Autumn shows Barbara Pym's sensitive artistry at its most sparkling. A classic from one of Britain's most loved and highly acclaimed novelists, its world is both extraordinary and familiar, revealing the eccentricities of everyday life.



Rave reviews...

An exquisite, even magnificent work of art ― The Observer
Barbara Pym has a sharp eye for the exact nuances of social behaviour ― The Times
The wit and style of a twentieth century Jane Austen ― Harpers & Queen
Very funny and keenly observant of the ridiculous as well as the pathetic in humanity ― Financial Times
A spare masterpiece of loneliness in retirement ― Telegraph
Quartet in Autumn is immeasurably her finest work of fiction ― Evening Standard
An alert miniaturist ... her novels have a distinctive flavour, as instantly recognisable as lapsang tea ― Daily Telegraph
No novelist brings more telling observation or more gentle pleasure ― Jilly Cooper

[Joy D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in London, this is a quiet book about two men and two women who work together. They do not know each other well personally but have worked in the same office for years. The two women retire. When one of the retired women appears to be declining, the others try to help, but it is difficult not to intrude on her privacy. It is a beautifully written character study about aging. Each takes a different approach. These characters feel so authentic and the situations true to life. It is melancholy but leaves the reader with a sense of optimism that something positive will come out of the sadness. I loved it.

[Plateresca · Rating 4 out of 5]

'August is a wicked month.'
So true!

'Quartet in Autumn' is a nostalgic, atmospheric novel that one needs time to appreciate. I mean, it doesn't take a lot of time to read it, but I think the whole beauty of it reveals itself when you finish the book.

There's not much going on, and a lot of what actually is going on is rather sad. Still, this is not a depressing book, and it's quite funny at times.

'...Mrs Pope did exactly those things that she wanted to do which made Letty realize that perhaps getting older had some advantages, few though these might be.'

This is how I imagined Mrs Pope, like Iris Rainbird from 'Midsomer Murders', although Mrs Pope is somewhat older.

What I really appreciate about Barbara Pym (judging by the two books that I've read, which is not much) is her unwavering conviction that one really can decide for oneself. A lot has been said along the lines of 'only connect', and yet being a recluse can be a conscious choice, and I appreciated the book's acceptance of it as a valid one, since I usually do not meet with a lot of understanding respecting it (I am, of course, an utter recluse - a Mr Norrell, in fact).

This novel is special and quite different from Excellent Women, which I also enjoyed greatly; all the more reason to look forward to reading more by Pym.

I would definitely recommend this article on the 'Quartet' by Raina Lipsitz.

[Skye · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this story that was more of a character study of four elderly office workers that lived quiet lives in London during the 1970's. Each character had their own unique quirks but ultimately their rigidness turned into a tale of loneliness.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Já há algum tempo que andava com vontade de ler Barbara Pym. Tinha pensado começar por um dos seus primeiros livros (Excellent Women), depois de ter lido e ouvido resenhas que me deixaram curiosa, mas acabou por vir parar-me este às mãos primeiro (obrigada ichi!).

Gostei imenso da escrita de Pym e da forma como caracteriza os seus personagens – quatro colegas de escritório, duas mulheres e dois homens, à beira da reforma. O livro fala essencialmente sobre a solidão, há uma certa tristeza que atravessa toda a história, mas também há humor, crítica social e, no final, uma certa nota de otimismo. Gostei muito.

[Maryam · Rating 4 out of 5]

زیبا، ساده، دلنشین و در عین‌حال آمیخته با غمی پنهان ناشی از تنهایی.
اینکه سن ما آدمها بالا میره و هرچقدر این سن بیشتر باشه، تنهایی و قبول اینکه واقعا انگار هرکسی درگیر خودشه و اونقدر وقت این رو نداره که از دیگری مراقبت کنه یا زیادی اهمیت بده، بیشتر به چشم میاد و مشهوده.
پذیرش اینکه زندگی به همین صورته و در نهایت هرکدوم از ما در سراسر زندگی خودمون رو داریم، حالا بعضی‌هامون دورمون شلوغ‌تره و بعضی خلوت‌تر.

[Karen·]

I don't think she's that underrated actually.

In 1977 the Times Literary Supplement polled a host of literary notables asking them to name the most underrated writer of the 20th century. Pym was the only author who received more than one vote; Larkin and Lord David Cecil both picked her.

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. After a slow start I really started to feel for the characters. A sensitive look at their lonely lives struggling to deal with retirement, trying to reach out in their own way, some with more success than others. Although sad I felt there was hope at the end. I will definately be reading more Barbara Pym.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful book about the life and times of four ordinary middle-aged people, two men and two women, who work together in an office in London, England, which I enjoyed very much. I particularly enjoyed the gentle pace and dark humor. Here are a couple of samples of the dark humor:

Consider the warning printed on plastic bags, which is meant to keep children safe, the words read something like, "'To avoid danger of suffocation keep this wrapper away from babies and children.' They could have said from middle-aged and elderly persons too, who might well have an irresistible urge to suffocate themselves." My immediate reaction was to laugh out loud when I read this, and then, I thought how true this can be on certain days. It takes courage to keep putting one foot in front of the other and energy to actively seek something beautiful in each day.

Then, "'I think just a cup of tea....' There was something to be said for tea and a comfortable chat about crematoria."

And now for something more hopeful, "it was difficult to think of Edwin and Norman as objects of romantic speculation, and two less country-loving people could hardly be imagined. But at least it made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change."