Leonora Eyre, an attractive and elegant, but essentially selfish, middle-aged woman, becomes friendly with antique dealer Humphrey Boyce and his nephew James.

Leonora makes use of Humphrey to humiliate Phoebe, and turns out a sitting tenant in order that James can take up a flat in her own house.

James attempts a reconciliation with Leonora, but she refuses to give him a second opportunity to hurt her, and settles for the admiration of the less attractive Humphrey.

Like all Pym's fiction, the novel contains many literary references, notably to works by Keats, John Milton and Henry James.

Pym sent the draft to her long-time correspondent, the poet Philip Larkin, who provided detailed critical suggestions.

[8] Pym's novels had come to be seen as old-fashioned, and out of tune with the public taste, given their delicate plots and the focus on mundane details of everyday life.

[15] The novel was published in Dutch in 1987 as En mijn duifje ging heen, in Italy in 1991 as Se una dolce colomba, in Spain as Murió la dulce paloma , in France as La douce colombe est morte, and in Germany as Das Täubchen (Little Dove).

Coming at the end of her career, there are fewer connections between The Sweet Dove Died and the rest of Pym's oeuvre, but the character of Ned reappears in the 1979 short story Across a Crowded Room, commissioned by The New Yorker, which is collected in the volume Civil to Strangers.