An Unsuitable Attachment

Barbara Pym

Mar 2013 · Pan Macmillan

About this ebook

'I'm a huge fan of Barbara Pym' Richard Osman

‘Barbara Pym is one of my most favourite novelists. Few other writers have given me more laughter and more pleasure.' Jilly Cooper

‘The day comes in the life of every single man living alone when he must give a dinner party.’

The parish of St Basil, on the fringes of North Kensington, is all of a flutter due to the arrival of Rupert Stonebird, a most eligible bachelor, in the neighbourhood. The local matchmakers are sure he will make a suitable husband for the vicar’s wife’s sister, Penny, or perhaps for local librarian Ianthe Broome?

But Ianthe is in danger of forming a most unsuitable attachment for her new library assistant, John, a man of questionable background with not a penny to his name...

Owing a debt to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Barbara Pym's An Unsuitable Attachment is an elegant and witty comedy of manners from an acclaimed author who Philip Larkin called: 'the most underrated novelist of the century'.

Ratings and reviews

Attach yourself to Unsuitable Attachment and experience the romances, workdays, church life and dining of a independent woman in 1950s-1960s London.

About the author

Barbara Pym (1913–1980) was a British novelist best known for her series of satirical novels on English middle-class society. A graduate of St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, Pym published the first of her nine novels, Some Tame Gazelle, in 1950, followed by five more books. Despite this early success and continuing popularity, Pym went unpublished from 1963 to 1977. Her work was rediscovered after a famous article in the Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated Pym as the most underrated writer of the century. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize.