“This morning, as she went about humming God moves in a mysterious way, Belinda wondered what to do first,” the English novelist Barbara Pym writes of a character. Her 1950 novel, “Some Tame Gazelle,” is a almost a book of quotations, set in a village steeped in the words of “Our Greater English Poets.”

From the archdeacon, whose sermons consist entirely of strung-together passages from such notable works as Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts,” to the Tacitus-quoting Italian Count Ricardo Bianco, to the humble spinster Belinda Bede, warming herself with fragments of Keats, the novel points to a culture and a language rooted in its literature.