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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

'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.'

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.

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