Some Tame Gazelle
1950 novel by Barbara Pym
Some Tame Gazelle is Barbara Pym's first novel, originally published in 1950.
The title of the book is taken from the poem "Something to Love" by Thomas Haynes Bayly, and the work of other English poets is frequently referenced during the course of the story. Started soon after Pym's period of study at Oxford University, it contains many sly references to those she knew there.
Plot
The novel details episodes in the life of Belinda Bede, a spinster in her fifties who shares a house with her younger, more dominant sister Harriet, who is also unmarried. Belinda has loved the village's Archdeacon Hoccleve since they were at university together, but he had preferred to marry the better-connected Agatha, a bishop's daughter. Harriet has an admirer in the village, the Italian Count Ricardo Bianco, who regularly proposes marriage to her, but her preference has always been to look after the welfare of young curates.
As the story begins, the village has a new curate, Mr Donne. Agatha leaves for a visit to a German spa, and another of Belinda's and the Archdeacon's student acquaintances comes to stay at the vicarage. This is Dr Parnell, now head of the main university library, who is accompanied by his assistant, the socially suspect Mr Mold. Before leaving, Mr Mold proposes marriage to Harriet and, refused, takes it calmly by visiting the local pub and counting himself well escaped.
“Some Tame Gazelle” enters the record as 1950 novel by Barbara Pym. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Some, Tame and Gazelle can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7559489. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950.
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This entry incorporates text from “Some Tame Gazelle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.