[Emma, the protagonist of A Few Green Leaves,] is a single woman, the last in Barbara Pym's line of observant female celibates.

As an anthropologist, she scrutinises the communal patterns of the village where she lives; as an unattached woman, she is increasingly aware of the lonely pressures of her own existence. Returning to what has often been one of her main concerns Barbara Pym ruefully sets the intellectual advantages of being an outsider against the emotional disadvantages…. As usual in this author's fiction, there is a high proportion of permanent and temporary celibates: the widowed, the separated, the unmarried and the unmarriageable. Most respond to their state with well-bred, chin-up resilience. But, while wryly chronicling the genteel stoicism of such characters, Barbara Pym never underrates the financial, social, and emotional stresses they are weathering with mannerly self-effacement.

The book's attitude to death is cheerfully down-to-earth. Its response to life is one of slightly melancholy irony. Keeping going on substitutes and second-bests, the majority of its characters have been disappointed but are not dispirited. The ability to find consolations for emotional lack always fascinates Miss Pym. Sometimes, she derives quirky comedy from it—as in her accounts of the various church-centred functions the lonely cluster to. At others, she quietly indicates how busy fendings-off of emptiness bring a bit of brightness into bleak-ish lives: spinster-polished church brasses gleam through the November gloom; a few green leaves crisply enliven an autumnal altar display.

The latter combination is appropriate…. Emma finally turns out to be one of Barbara Pym's late-flowering spinsters: after an old relationship has shown itself incapable of sprouting into much, a new one buds promisingly—and extremely aptly—as this novel stocked with seasonal imagery ends.