The title of the book is taken from the poem "Something to Love" by Thomas Haynes Bayly,[1] and the work of other English poets is frequently referenced during the course of the story.

The novel details episodes in the life of Belinda Bede, a spinster now in her fifties who shares a house with her younger, more dominant sister Harriet, who is also unmarried.

Since her university days, Belinda has loved the village's Archdeacon Hoccleve, with whom she studied then, although 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.

Before leaving, Mr Mold proposes marriage to Harriet and, refused, takes it calmly by visiting the local pub and counting himself well escaped.

When Agatha returns, she brings home Dr Grote, the colonial bishop of Mbawawa, a former protégé of Harriet's during the time when he was a curate.

As life returns to normal, a new curate arrives to claim Harriet's attention, while Belinda finds "such consolation as she needed in our greater English poets", gardening and good works.

[4] World War II interrupted Pym's budding literary career, and she finally revised the novel to the point where it was accepted by Cape in 1950.

The Manchester Guardian called it "an enchanting book about village life" while Antonia White reviewed the novel for the New Statesman:[9] (Pym) keeps her design so perfectly to scale, and places one mild tint in such happy juxtaposition to another that this reader ... derived considerable pleasure from it.It has been considered a remarkable first novel, because of the way in which the youthful Pym — who began the book while still a student — imagined herself into the situation of a middle-aged spinster, living with her sister in the country.

[13] Besides herself and her sister Hilary, who are the characters Belinda and Harriet Bede, many others with whom Barbara Pym had associated at Oxford were included, sometimes under revealing names.

Principal among them was Robert Liddell, nicknamed "Jock" as in the diary entry, who is Dr Nicholas Parnell, the former university friend who comes to stay with the Archdeacon.