[A Few Green Leaves] is both elegiac and hopeful. It gives a sense of pity for lost opportunities, but at the same time a courageous opening to the future.

High comedy needs a settled world, ready to resent disturbance, and in her nine novels Barbara Pym stuck serenely to the one she knew best…. This meant that the necessary confrontations must take place at cold Sunday suppers, little gatherings, visits, funerals, and so on, which Barbara Pym, supremely observant in her own territory, was able to convert into a battleground. Here, even without intending it, a given character is either advancing or retreating: you have, for instance, an unfair advantage if your mother is dead, 'just a silver-framed photograph', over someone whose mother lives in Putney. And in the course of the struggle strange fragments of conversation float to the surface, lyrical moments dear to Barbara Pym.

'An anthropophagist,' declared Miss Doggett in an authoritative tone. 'He does some kind of scientific work, I believe.'

'I thought it meant a cannibal—someone who ate human flesh,' said Jane in wonder.

'Well, science has made such strides,' said Miss Doggett doubtfully….

As might be expected, however, of such a brilliant comic writer, the issues are not comic at all. Three kinds of conflict recur throughout Barbara Pym's novels: growing old (on which she concentrated in the deeply touching Quartet in Autumn; hanging on to some kind of individuality, however crushed, however dim; and adjusting the vexatious distance between men and women. These, indeed, are novels without heroes…. If men are less than angels, Barbara Pym's men are rather less than men, not wanting much more than constant attention and comfort…. Women see through them clearly enough, but are drawn towards them by their own need and by a compassion which is taken entirely for granted. Men are allowed, indeed conditioned, to deceive themselves to the end, and are loved as self-deceivers.

Women have their resource—the romantic imagination. This faculty, which Jane Austen (and James Joyce, for that matter) considered so destructive, is the secret 'richness' of Barbara Pym's heroines….

Barbara Pym nevertheless guards against sentimentality. She is the writer who points out 'the desire to do good without much personal inconvenience that lurks in most of us', the regrettable things said between friends and 'the satisfaction which is to be got from saying precisely things of that kind', the irritation we feel 'when we have made up our minds to dislike people for no apparent reason and they perform a kind action'. But towards her characters she shows a creator's charity. She understands them so well that the least she can do is to forgive them….

Through all Barbara Pym's work there is a consistency of texture, as well as of background. She has described the texture herself as 'pain, amusement, surprise, resignation'.