In the mid-1970s, anthropologist Emma Howick comes to live in a cottage belonging to her mother in a small English village, planning to write up her study of new towns.

They include the rector Tom and his sister Daphne, who came to 'make a home' for him after the death of his wife, two doctors (a generation apart in age and attitudes) and their wives, a food critic, a bohemian academic couple and a number of spinsters.

Emma ponders whether she could adjust permanently to village life, and notes the changes that time has wrought on local customs.

First, a former lover, Graham Pettifer – also an academic – rents a cottage near the village to complete a text he is working on, and Emma feels herself drawn back into his life, even though she finds him boring.

[1] As was her custom, Pym kept detailed notebooks on her observations of daily life, and had been making notes that would form the book at least as early as 1976.

In Pym's initial draft of the novel, Emma's decision to stay in the village and pursue the love affair was present, but it was more tentative; she made the decision more concrete in the final draft [8] Barbara Everett writes that, although in some senses the book can be seen as a "farewell", "its cogency comes from a strength and clarity that are more than simply private: and its writer was something more than a woman who has had a switchback life and is now dying of it.

[12] However Kirkus Reviews felt that the book was "minor Pym--really just a neutral-toned catchall of her acute angles on loneliness and the ravages of time-marching-on", but would appeal to her devoted fans.

[13] Pym's long-time friend, the literary critic Robert Liddell, referred to the book and its sombre-but-hopeful tone as "Barbara's farewell to her readers".

[14] Critics have examined the way in which Pym shows how "[m]odernity has crept into this more contemporary version of provincial life", including the changes in gender norms represented by the married couples in the book, the impact of modern technology, and the way in which the vicar's central role in village life in previous generations has largely been supplanted by doctors and self-sufficiency.

Pym considered having the characters of Letty and Marjorie, from her novel Quartet in Autumn, come to live in the village in A Few Green Leaves.