[1] Ianthe Broome is a well-bred librarian in her mid-thirties who has been left in comfortable circumstances by her late parents, so that she is able to buy a house in an up-and-coming London suburb.

Pym wrote back to Cape to express her feeling that she had been unfairly treated, and received a sympathetic but firm response.

[5] According to some accounts, the reason was its being "out of step with the racier literary climate of the sixties";[1] others say Cape and possible further publishers viewed it as commercially unviable, even when endorsed by Philip Larkin, who said: [6] "It was a great pleasure and excitement to me to read An Unsuitable Attachment in typescript and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The novel was published in France in 1989 as Une demoiselle comme il faut (A Good Lady), and in Italy in 1987 as Una relazione sconveniente (An Improper Relationship).

[6] Larkin wrote that he found himself "not caring very greatly for Ianthe...her decency and good breeding are stated rather than shown", and he further observed: "I don't myself think that the number of the characters matters much; I enjoyed the book's richness in this respect.

What I did feel was that there was a certain familiarity about some of them; Sophia and Penelope seemed to recall Jane and Prudence, and Mark Nicholas; Mervyn has something of Arthur Grampian, and of course we have been among the anthropologists before.

What this adds up to is perhaps a sense of coasting - which doesn't bother me at all, but which might strike a critical publisher's reader – unsympathetic I mean rather than acute – as constituting 'the mixture as before'.

It features appearances by or mentions of Harriet Bede from Some Tame Gazelle, Professor Fairfax and Digby Fox from Less than Angels, Wilf Bason from A Glass of Blessings, and several characters from Excellent Women including Esther Clovis, Everard Bone, his wife Mildred and his mother, and Sister Blatt.

Pym re-used the characters of Mark and Sophia, as well as the cat Faustina, from An Unsuitable Attachment for her short story "A Christmas Visit", commissioned by the Church Times in 1978.