Miss Doggett likes to entertain students to tea at her gloomy Victorian home in Banbury Road.

When a new and unmarried curate, Stephen Latimer, comes to lodge at her house, he strikes up a friendship with her paid companion, Jessie Morrow, through whose eyes much of the action is seen.

Miss Doggett's nephew, Francis Cleveland, a middle-aged don at the (fictitious) Randolph College of Oxford University, begins a romantic relationship with one of his students, Barbara Bird, who has a crush on him.

Francis and Barbara visit the British Museum together; coincidentally, Edward Killigrew, a Bodley library assistant, is there at the same time and hears them declaring their love for each other.

The title of the book is the name of a fictitious village called Crampton Hodnet, which Mr. Latimer invents[3] as an off-the-cuff excuse when asked where he has been, as he does not wish to admit he has been out for a walk with Miss Morrow instead of attending church.

Crampton Hodnet was revised by Pym's close friend and executor Hazel Holt and published in 1985 by Macmillan in England and E. P. Dutton in the United States.

When Crampton Hodnet was first published in 1985, The New York Times acknowledged that "the disparate parts of this novel do not quite mesh into the seamless wonder of later works" but was largely positive.

[18] The novel features some of Pym's common tropes, including intertextual use of quotes from English poetry, women being treated dismissively by men, and male characters who are exaggeratedly silly.

Pym also uses clothing and alcoholic drinks as symbols to help clarify characters' social positions, as when Miss Morrow obsesses over a green dress she has been keeping for a special occasion even though it is inappropriate to her station in life, when Miss Doggett drinks sherry or Francis Cleveland takes a bottle of Niersteiner Glöck wine on a seductive picnic.