Some Tame Gazelle.

London: Jonathan Cape,, 1950. A rare signed copy of the author's debut novel First edition, second impression, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "with best wishes, from Barbara Pym, 11.2.51". Pym began her roman-à-clef on graduating from St Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1934. As her first published novel, it "established a pattern" for her later work, with "its dry humour and irony, its concentration on middle-aged spinsters, clergy, and the detail of deeply unfashionable lives" (Orlando). At Oxford, Pym devoted herself to her twin passions of English poetry and the Church of England, and encountered her third passion, Henry Harvey, a fellow undergraduate who served as the model for Henry Hoccleve. While her diary records that she and Hoccleve did have a romance of sorts, he was largely distant and uninterested. Writing Some Tame Gazelle was partly Pym's attempt to "get a handle on a distressing love affair" (Huneven). She populated the book with herself, her sister, and their circle of friends, imagined as middle-aged, affording her "some comic distance [from] this disappointing interlude" (ibid.). In a review, Antonia White wrote "Miss Pym, working in petit point, makes each stitch with perfect precision"; she "will almost certainly be compared to Jane Austen and very possibly to Trollope" (p. 21). Another contemporary review suggested comparison with Elizabeth Gaskell. Octavo. Original light brown cloth, spine and front cover lettered in blue. With dust jacket. Spine cocked, ends worn, outer leaves gently foxed, else clean; jacket spine panel toned, slight loss at head of spine not affecting text, edges chipped and creased, rear panel discoloured, unclipped: a very good copy in like jacket. Michelle Huneven, "Love In Her Own Peculiar Way: Barbara Pym, Useless Longings, and Some Tame Gazelle", Barbara Pym Society, available online; Antonia White, "New Novels", The New Statesman and Nation, 1 July 1950.