Barbara Pym

Excellent Women is one of Barbara Pym's richest and most amusing high comedies. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those "excellent women," the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors--anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door--the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.

Excellent Women

Laura Dobie

‘Have you seen our friend Everard Bone at all?’ Rocky called out.

Immediately he asked this, I realised that there had been a little nagging worry, an unhappiness, almost, at the back of my mind. Everard Bone and his meat. Of course it sounded ridiculous put like that and I decided that I would not mention it to Rocky, He would mock and not understand. It made me sad to realise that he would not understand, that perhaps he did not really understand anything about me.

‘Yes. I think so,’ I said, relieved that it had shown itself at last, for it would indeed have been a dreadful thing if I had led priests astray.

I was a little taken aback at her summing-up of the position and must have shown it in my face, for she laughed and said, 'Oh, yes, men are very simple and obvious in some ways, you know. They generally react in the way one would expect and it is often rather a cowardly way. I should think Everard was most alarmed when he heard that Rocky and I weren't getting on very well. He doesn't really care twopence about prehistory, you know. He always uses the society as an excuse, just because I don't happen to be a member myself." 

This seemed to me rather a waste of a subscription and there was something altogether comic about the thought of a man hiding from a woman behind a cloak of prehistory.

‘Oh, dear, how sad.’ I was really sorry to think that the benevolent-looking old man with crumbs in his beard was no more.

‘He dropped down dead in the library - the kind of way everybody says they'd like to go.’

'And Father Malory gave her a hearthrug,' I went on, unable to stop myself. 

‘Oh, that moth-eaten old thing out of his study? I shouldn't think that means anything. Besides, Father Malory wouldn't marry,' said Sister Blatt positively.

‘I don't know. We have no reason for thinking that he wouldn’t. Anyway, widows nearly always do marry again.’

‘Oh, they have the knack of catching a man. Having done it once I suppose they can do it again. I suppose there's nothing in it when you know how.'

There is so much dry, understated humour in this book that makes me giggle.

We went into the house. Dora decided to do some washing before supper and within half an hour the kitchen was festooned with lines of depressing-looking underwear - fawn locknit knickers and petticoats of the same material. It was even drearier than mine.

This so beautifully captures ordinary, everyday life.

I wondered that she should waste so much energy fighting over a little matter like wearing hats in chapel, but then I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us - the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.

We lapsed into a comfortable silence. It was a kind of fiction that we had always kept up, this not knowing anyone at the moment that we wanted to marry, as if there had been in the past and would be in the future.

When the first course came, it turned out to be spaghetti of articularly long and rubbery kind. Rocky showed me how to twist it round my fork but I found it very difficult to manage and it made conversation quite impossible. Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with nobody to watch one's struggles. Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite somebody eating spaghetti?

I ought perhaps to make some friendly overture if he were there next week. I could make it a Lent resolution to try to like him.

This made me giggle. It’s like 1950s Jane Austen.

Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.

There was certainly no mention of them 'going their own ways', and yet how did I really know that they didn't? This idea raised disquieting thoughts and doubts, so I turned on the wireless to distract me. But it was a women's programme and they all sounded so married and splendid, their lives so full and yet so well organİsed, that I felt more than usually spinsterish and useless.

Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person, nor have I ever thought of myself as being like her.

This book is a delight from start to finish and had me laughing out loud in places. A satirical, self-deprecating and, at times, rather sad exploration of the lives of ‘excellent’, and inevitably, put-upon, women in the 1950s.

Cover design by Orla Kiely Mildred Lathbury is one of those 'excellent women' who is often taken for granted. She is a godsend, 'capable of dealing with most of the stock situations of life - birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sales, the garden fete spoilt by bad weather'. As such, though, she often gets herself embroiled in other people's lives - and especially those of her glamorous new neighbours, the Napiers, whose marriage seems to be on the rocks. One cannot take sides in these matters, though it is tricky, especially when Mildred, teetering on the edge of spinsterhood, has a soft spot for dashing young Rockingham Napier. This is Barbara Pym's world at its funniest and most touching.

Jade Flynn

Read for my 'Acceptable' N.E.W.T in Arithmany 2019 #magicalreadathon. Prompt - Book that ends on an even page number. Career choice - Ministry of Magic, Department of Mysteries Worker.  This was endearing and slightly amusing but I didn't think it was story that I felt really needed to be told. The reviews of Pym's novels are slathered with comparisons to Austen but just from this book I don't see a really see a hard parallel.

Stas

Emily Rundle

Excellent Women is probably the most famous of Barbara Pym's novels. The acclaim a few years ago for this early comic novel, which was hailed by Lord David Cecil as one of 'the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years,' helped launch the rediscovery of the author's entire work. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a spinster in the England of the 1950s, one of those 'excellent women' who tend to get involved in other people's lives - such as those of her new neighbor, Rockingham, and the vicar next door. This is Barbara Pym's world at its funniest.

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Mildred Lathbury is one of those 'excellent women' who is often taken for granted. She is a godsend, 'capable of dealing with most of the stock situations of life - birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sales, the garden fete spoilt by bad weather'. As such, she often gets herself embroiled in other people's lives - especially those of her glamorous new neighbours, the Napiers, whose marriage seems to be on the rocks. One cannot take sides in these matters, though it is tricky, especially as Mildred, teetering on the edge of spinsterhood, has a soft spot for dashing young Rockingham Napier. This is Barbara Pym's world at its funniest and most touching.

Excellent Women

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