No Fond Return Of Love

In this novel, the author Barbara Pym makes an appearance in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock. This is something she did in one or two of the novels, and it contrasts with the apparently conventional nature of her works. She is one of the guests at the guest house with ‘bright Christian atmosphere’ in Taviscombe. She is described as ‘ordinary-looking and unaccompanied’ and consequently no one takes any notice of her, even though some of them had ‘read and enjoyed her books’. Her fellow guests do not realise that they are being observed.

Barbara Pym also had a habit of using major characters from one novel as minor ones in another, and here we see Wilmet, Piers, Keith and Rodney from A Glass of Blessings as tourists looking at the castle.