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Quartet in Autumn

Barbara Pym

3.94 · Rating details · 3,141 ratings · 431 reviews

Combining an acute eye for the eccentricities of everyday life with her unique talent for illuminating human frailties, Barbara Pym has created a world which is both extraordinary and totally familiar

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Paperback, 186 pages

Published August 20th 2004 by Pan Macmillan (first published September 1st 1977)

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Jan 16, 2017 Rebecca rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: obscure-classics, old-age-or-ageing, newbury-library, booker-shortlisted, get-free-bookshop, reviewed-for-blog

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 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. ...more

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Jun 18, 2020 Hugh rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2020, modern-lit, modern-classics, booker-shortlist

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 Ma ...more

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Aug 17, 2019 Katie Lumsden rated it really liked it

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.

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Mar 12, 2019 Wanda rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: brit-lit, all-the-single-ladies, z-1001-books, favourites, women-of-a-certain-age, female-authors, read-in-2019, public-library

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 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. ...more

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Jul 18, 2009 Cynthia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: re-read-in-2013

“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 ...more

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Mar 13, 2017 Skye rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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.

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May 02, 2016 ·Karen· added it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: The terminally bored - they'll read anything

Shelves: brits

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

(view spoiler) ...more

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Jun 18, 2013 Ali rated it it was amazing

When I first read Quartet in Autumn I think I found it a little sad – veering towards depressing. Maybe this is the kind of book that one needs to be in the right frame of mind for. This time I found I really loved it. Although this novel does seem to be a bit different from other Barbara Pym novels, there are still plenty of Pymisms to be found. This was the novel that was published in 1977 after Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil had both separately and independently of each other, named Barba
When I first read Quartet in Autumn I think I found it a little sad – veering towards depressing. Maybe this is the kind of book that one needs to be in the right frame of mind for. This time I found I really loved it. Although this novel does seem to be a bit different from other Barbara Pym novels, there are still plenty of Pymisms to be found. This was the novel that was published in 1977 after Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil had both separately and independently of each other, named Barbara Pym as the most under rated novelist. It was also the novel which found her nominated for the Booker Prize. There certainly is a more melancholic feeling to ‘Quartet in Autumn’ – focusing as it does, on four lonely people as they approach retirement from a dull unimportant office job.
“That day the four of them went to the library, though at different times. The library assistant, if he had noticed them at all, would have seen them as people who belonged together in some way”
Edwin, Marcia Norman and Letty – work together in an unspecified office. They have worked together for a number of years – and although they are a similar age – they don’t socialise out of work or have any kind of personal relationship. Letty and Norman each live in bedsits – while Marcia and Edwin each live alone in what were family homes, Edwin in the home he shared with his wife, Marcia in the house she lived in with her parents. Edwin likes to visit churches in his lunch hour; Letty sometimes goes to the library. Marcia remembers with fond nostalgia her time in hospital, where she under- went ‘major surgery’ under the auspices of Mr Strong for whom she nurses tender feelings. In the shed in her over grown garden Marcia hoards empty milk bottles, just as she hoards tinned food – although barely eats anything. When Letty finds the house she lives in is sold to a new landlord, a pastor of an obscure African church, she is nervous of the noisy lively family he brings with him and with Edwin’s help re-locates to a new room in the home of octogenarian Mrs Pole.
Marcia and Letty retire before Edwin and Norman (remember the days when women retired five years earlier than men?) – and while Marcia and Letty need to adjust and find ways of filling their days, Edwin and Norman occasionally wonder how “the girls” are getting on. Marcia is annoyed by a medical social worker who keeps trying to call, while Letty settles into a new routine with Mrs Pole.
“In Mrs Pole’s house the telephone rang just as she and Letty were settling down to watch television. They quite often did this now, and although it had started by Mrs Pope suggesting that Letty might like to watch the news or some improving programme of cultural or scientific interest there was now hardly an evening when Letty did not come down to watch whatever happened to be on the box, whether it was worthy of attention or not.”
The story of these quiet sad, lonely people are not entirely dispiriting though, while Marcia becomes more obsessive and secretive – Letty at least shows she is able to remain positive and move forward in her life, even beginning to reach out to the people around her by the end of the novel.
A novel of four ageing lonely people who have out lived their usefulness – whose jobs, when they retire will not be re-filled – is understandably poignant, but it is also shot through with Barbara Pym’s sharp humour. In ‘Quartet in Autumn’ Barbara Pym seems in part to have been examining the fate of single elderly people, who is it that will look out for them? Whose responsibility is it to see that someone is taking the necessary care of themselves? The system (as Pym must have seen existing in the 1970’s) is seen to fail Marcia – who seems to slip through the social care net.
These characters who I once found so sad, spoke to me in a completely different way this time. Barbara Pym’s minute observations of people, are quite brilliant, the humour and pathos are handled deftly and saved this from being overwhelmingly sorrowful.
...more

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May 25, 2015 Josh Friedlander rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-classics, depressive-realism

There's something magnetic about Barbara Pym's prose and her prickly, very private, isolated protagonists. On the book's cover, each of the characters faces away from the centre; indeed, a very superficial reader might leave this book with the impression that the characters don't much like each other. But that would be to mistake their very British reserve for lack of compassion. On the contrary, there is so much compassion in the awkward way that the four retired protagonists connect. Their tho ...more

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Jan 08, 2014 Sandy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: intntl-britain, fiction, author-female, 2014-read, aging-death

Realistic but sad portrayal of four retirement-age people who work together in one office but are not really friends. They are all quirky and lonely people who over time, and because of the death of one of them, seem to become aware that all they have is each other. The end is very optimistic and hopeful, but the book is rather a drudgery of humdrum daily lives. Perhaps because I am at that stage of life, the message hits too close to home. Barbara Pym has the reputation of being a wonderful aut ...more

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Apr 18, 2018 Ruthiella rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Quartet in Autumn is about two men and two women in their early sixties, solitary but not necessarily lonely Londoners, who work in the same office in the mid-1970s. The reader never finds out exactly what it is they do for a living, “The activities of their department seemed to be shrouded in mystery-something to do with records or filing, it was thought, nobody knew for certain, but it was evidently ‘women’s work’, the kind of thing that could easily be replaced by a computer.”. When the two w ...more

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Nov 17, 2016 Leslie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: social-commentary, owned

A look at 4 unmarried people of retirement age in the 1970s, 2 men and 2 women who work together (before the women retire). As I am approaching this age myself, I found some aspects of this a little daunting but I take heart in the fact that I am not like Marcia!!

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Jul 06, 2020 Cphe rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020, england, psychological, boxall-2020, poignant

Understated and poignant story of four very different people who work together and are fast approaching retirement. No one is looking forward to an uncertain future fraught with loneliness and isolation.

Beautifully written and gently paced. From the Boxall 1000 list.

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Oct 26, 2016 Jana rated it liked it

Shelves: fruta-suave, anglophile

The 4 characters in this tale are in their 60s, but you'd think they were decades beyond that! I can't tell if Barbara Pym was writing this tongue in cheek or if the 1970s were really so different from today.

I really enjoyed the book despite the comments above. In my view, the characters are the reason to read Barbara Pym. But the story is also interesting; the writing is wonderful. This book was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1977.

I've found these recurrent themes in the 3 books I've re ...more

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Jun 03, 2012 SarahC rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-fiction

A more intense Pym work than ever. Reading Pym is like someone sitting eye to eye with you and talking very honestly about the private thoughts, faults, and wishes of people. No baloney, no highly-built plots, no messiness. Her characters are aggravating, just like people we know. They aren't always attractive or sexy. They age and make mistakes and sometimes cannot get outside of themselves. And they often miss the brass ring, but are still ok in spite of it. And through these characters Barbar ...more

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Aug 27, 2010 Thomas rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

As usual Pym is wonderful. This one is rather darker than most of her other novels. This is what Anita Brookner would be like if she had a sense of humor.

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Feb 01, 2016 Zombie Kitten rated it really liked it

Shelves: zk-1001-challenge

Although I can't totally relate with the stage of life that the characters are in, I did find them interesting, sympathetic, and I liked how it showed the different ways in which each character handled life changes and how they approached getting older.

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Jun 12, 2017 Jane rated it it was amazing

Shelves: modern-fiction

I just re-read this for the second time and , to my surprise, it ended on a more upbeat note than I had remembered. Each character is sensitively portrayed and the manner in which they relate to one another rings true. They both know and care more about each other than they realize.

How each person puts meaning into his or her life is written in the understated and clear-eyed Pym manner. There is pathos, tenderness, and humor here and Quartet in Autumn reigns supreme for me over all Pym's other ...more

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Dec 25, 2016 kasia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I've decided to stop resisting the impulse to give Barbara Pym novels 5 stars, because let's face it, I love them. Despite her trademark lightness and wit, however, this is a fantastically grim and bleak novel. 4 friends -- or rather, colleagues, for they are barely friends -- approach retirement. Hilarious hijinx most decidedly do not ensue. They are difficult people; lonely, yet nervously hostile to foreigners and Black people, and mean-spirited towards each other; searching for intellectual a ...more

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Aug 13, 2018 Claudia rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-reviewed

This book made me want to go and stick my head in the oven - but in a good way! It's a simple, elegiac and darkly humorous novel about middle age in a certain era. The loneliness of the four main characters is palpable and the mundane and repressed existence of the post-war middle classes as they near retirement is vividly captured on every page. The humour lies in the subtle mockery of their lives, but not in mocking the characters themselves whom I feel the author secretly loves. As did I. Wri ...more

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Nov 20, 2015 Hilary rated it it was amazing

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.

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Feb 20, 2015 Mary Durrant rated it it was amazing

What a lovely but sad novel.
Barbara Pym has such an eye for detail of the eccentricities of life and human frailties as we approach old age. Told with wit and charm.
I loved it!

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Aug 15, 2019 Mary Lou rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I've a feeling that Quartet in Autumn (what a lovely title!) is a novel that will stay with me for a long time, and will go up in my estimation more and more as time goes on. It's a quiet, slow-paced story. Pym's brilliance (and this is my first of her novels) lies in her ability to write about the mundane, not delving too deep, yet still managing to paint a clear picture of her characters in all their humanity. Also amazing is that there was a LOT to dislike about these people, and yet somehow ...more

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Jun 27, 2017 Olivermagnus rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017, opi, england, classics, foreign-literature, fiction

This was a fascinating look at four co-workers in the autumn of their lives. Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia are all in their 60's and approaching retirement. They work together as clerks in a nondescript office, but each of them seems very alone. None of them have much of a life outside their jobs and they don't appear to be very close. In fact, they never even go to lunch together.

Pym slowly reels out the stories of each of the quartet. Edwin spends a lot of his time monitoring church activit ...more

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Nov 21, 2012 Susan rated it it was amazing

I have to admit that I nearly chose not to read this book after learning that the four protagonists are middle-aged. Sort of like how Disney didn't want to back the movie "Up" when they didn't want to market old men action figures. And if you've seen "Up"-you know how wrong we both were.

It is very much one of those novels that every so often hits you with a line that makes you put the book down and stare at the ceiling. In other words, the best kind of novels.

I've never really read anything tha ...more

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Jun 18, 2009 Maria rated it liked it

Vintage, wonderful Pym, but too close for comfort, as I'm getting up there in years myself. But is 60 is the new 40? Her characters are beautifully drawn, and out of four isolated individuals Pym creates a sort of bittersweetly harmonic symphony with a note of optimism at the end.

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Oct 15, 2018 Ellen rated it liked it · review of another edition

A book about four people, two women and two men, who work together in an office doing work that is never explained. The women, Marcia and Letty, are being laid off and will not be replaced, leaving the men, Erwin and Norman, to carry on alone. At first the men are dismayed but quickly accustom themselves to having the office to themselves.

Erwin and Norman decide to keep in touch with both women, and the plot proceeds. Not to include spoilers allow me to say that one of the women dies. The men ca ...more

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Nov 21, 2019 Pamela rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: boxall-1001-2018-read

A touching and restrained portrayal of loneliness. Work colleagues Letty, Marcia, Norman and Edwin are all approaching retirement and live alone in London. Pym examines their relationships with each other and with the wider world - neighbours, fellow churchgoers, adult family - and shines a light on ordinary but universal human feelings. This book is often sad or poignant, but it is not depressing as ultimately the potential for change and for human contact is present.

A deceptively simple book, ...more

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Oct 06, 2019 Jennifer (aka EM) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: lonely-hearts-club, novellas, spinsters-in-the-hood

Love, love, love these little novels/novellas that pack a huge punch. This is prime Pym: quietly observational, poignant and compassionate, while also cut through with dark and eviscerating humour (the social worker!).

Marcia is the real and heartbreaking star here: defiant in her misfittery to the very end.

Themes: aging in a changing world, loneliness, the fragility and necessity of human connection.

Outstanding.

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Aug 04, 2019 Tara rated it it was ok

217 pages consisting of a cry of despair to make The Woman in the Dunes seem a cheery romp, only what should be a cry (or a wail, a scream) is insulated by the deliberate rejection of the imagination till it's nothing more than a muffle. While the book does show admirable attention to people on the edge of society, along with what seems realistic portrayals of their outer lives, my quarrel with Barbara Pym comes with my confusion about her intent, a confusion she does nothing to clear up especia 217 pages consisting of a cry of despair to make The Woman in the Dunes seem a cheery romp, only what should be a cry (or a wail, a scream) is insulated by the deliberate rejection of the imagination till it's nothing more than a muffle. While the book does show admirable attention to people on the edge of society, along with what seems realistic portrayals of their outer lives, my quarrel with Barbara Pym comes with my confusion about her intent, a confusion she does nothing to clear up especially in relation to their inner lives. It would take only the slightest hint from her for the book to entirely shift its meaning. Unfortunately, it seems Miss Pym's outlook may actually have been as small as the world inhabited by her characters. Cruel? Perhaps, though it's worth recalling she wrote Quartet as an expression of her own fears as a spinster on the verge of retirement. What went unsaid and unexamined throughout the book must be of some clue to her worldview.

The abundance of details cannot amend for the author's greyness of character and temperament. Certainly the smallness, even meanness, of her characters is no strike against the talent of the portrayal; what is amiss is that even Sartre, he of "hell is other people," can create a work where something is at stake. Maybe what is at stake is the meaninglessness of existence, but there's anger and sincerity and energy about the way things are. Other chroniclers of the indignity and anomie of mid-20th century life charted the substitutes for meaning and community pursued by madmen, saints, and humdrum minds alike, but at least recognized that these things were substituting for something missed. They recognized despair drugging itself even if they didn't understand the broader situation.

Pym doesn't reflect on the culture which has created the situation the four leads of Quartet find themselves in other than a few colorless remarks about pensions and social workers. More frustratingly, Pym seems helpless to do anything other than reduce her characters to a few routines and bits of trivia. Ah, that angry Norman, what a surprise that he has a jazzy bathrobe! One wants to die. It's bad enough for people in the real world to be constantly acting as reductionists, but for an author to do this to her own characters without either pushing back (see Kazuo Ishiguro or Iris Murdoch) or analyzing the society which turns people into caricatures of themselves leads one to ask: why go to all the trouble of writing a book in the first place?

Compare Quartet with a masterpiece like The Remains of the Day, where the great attention to detail does not obscure the enormous significance the slightest shift may have in the moral lives of the characters. Ishiguro could, with subtlety and grace, allow the reader to glimpse behind the veil of lies we tell ourselves about our lives. Pym doesn't seem to believe there's a veil of lies, she's not interested in those lies, and while she notices how small and sad and lonely our world can be, she has no interest in how it got that way or why it stays that way. She has struggled to end multiple books and I can't help but wonder if that's because she simply didn't have anything to say. The works are chronicles of her concern that she was drab without wanting to actually face that concern.

Her books are worthy of notice because they are very much "slices of life" which deftly tell us something about the vanity, sterility, and lack of interest in the world that arose among the lonely but comfortable atomized people of the post-war West. Better to suffer under the loveless sky than to sit numb and dumb before one of the three channels every night on the box and eat tinned beans, I suppose. However, the author, like her characters, shrugged at the opportunity to tell the story of that post-war world, instead noticing only her own little routines, willfully reducing them to machine-like habits, and failed to even grasp the significance of *that* story.

These are grey people, deserving of sympathy, but in the end T.S. Eliot's mumblings about whether or not to eat a peach seem like the angsty rhetoric of an emo teen beside the deliberately self-stunted residents of a Pym novel. Lord knows the world is full of petty and broken people, but Quartet does not respond with wrath, hope, glee, horror, shame, frustration, despair, grief, or transcendence. It doesn't respond with anything at all. It's a lead pencil in a balloon, a shrugging of the human heart's aspirations to anything other than the discount table at the jumble sale. Infinite possibilities indeed. ...more

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About Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym

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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 6 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 a 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 6 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. ...more