A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym is one of my favorite authors. Even though her novels are primarily set in rural English villages in the mid-twentieth century, they are still relevant today with their social observations and comic phrasing. Pym always wrote about what she knew. She lived in London during her working life, then retired to live with her sister in an Oxfordshire village. Her life there consisted of church, gardening, local history and country walks. A Few Green Leaves, which was completed shortly before her death, is an account of the changes in contemporary village life, as seen through the eyes of anthropologist Emma Howick. Emma, who is unmarried and nearing middle age, is spending a year in her professor mother's rural cottage with the intention of writing a paper on village life. She meets an assortment of characters - a widowed clergyman and his sister, two local doctors, a self-centered bachelor, an academic old flame who is there to work on his book, and a surplus of unmarried older women. The plot is minor but Pym's perceptive insights into human relationships are priceless.