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Overview
One of Barbara Pym’s richest and most amusing high comedies, Excellent Women has at its center Mildred Lathbury, 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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780143104872 |
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Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 12/26/2006 |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 256 |
Sales rank: | 124,233 |
Product dimensions: | 5.08(w) x 7.72(h) x 0.59(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
A. N. Wilson (introducer) was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby School and New College, Oxford. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has held a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism, winning prizes for much of his work and contributing to the London Even Standard, Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, Spectator, Observer, and Daily Mail, among others. He lives in London.
What People are Saying About This
So there it stands, the world above the Thames: what stays longest with the reader once the amusement, the satire, the alert ear and exact eye have all been acknowledged? Partly it is the underlying lonliness of life...the absence of self-pity, the scrupulousness of one's relations with others, the small blame of comfort...the sparkle her novels had on first acquaintace has been succeeded by the deeper brilliance of established art.
[One of] the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years. (Lord David Cecil)
A startling reminder that solitude may be chosen and that a lively, full novel can be constructed entirely within the precincts of that regressive virtue, feminine patience. (John Updike, The New Yorker)
Reading Barbara Pym is . . . a wonderful experience, full of unduplicable perceptions, sensations, and soul-stirrings. (Newsweek)
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women is a novel about a woman named Mildred Lathbury who is living in London in the 1950s. A self-proclaimed spinster, virtuous almost to a fault, intelligent, and entirely without family, Mildred is alone and content to be so. As the story begins, she is leading a quiet life of churchgoing and part-time charity work, with the Malorys—Julian, a pastor and single man, and his frazzled, sweet sister, Winifred—as her dearest friends.
However, as Mildred herself notes, “An unmarried woman, just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people’s business” (p. 5). And so upon her too-comfortable existence enter a host of unsettling and decidedly unvirtuous characters: the Napiers—Helena and Rockingham—a glamorous and unconventional couple who become Mildred’s housemates; Allegra Gray, the calculating widow who destabilizes Mildred’s relationship with the Malorys; and Everard Bone, the aloof anthropologist who befriends Mildred against all of her expectations.
The Napiers’ marriage is on the rocks, due to Helena’s fierce dedication to her anthropological fieldwork and to dashing Rockingham’s effortless romancing of every woman he encounters. As their go-between and confidant, Mildred suddenly finds herself swept into their milieu of romantic drama and self-important science. Two love triangles develop: between the Napiers and Everard Bone, and between Allegra Gray, Julian Malory, and, to her surprise, Mildred herself. Even as she expresses her intent to preserve her independence, a number of potential suitors present themselves. The more Mildred tries to extricate herself, the more involved she becomes, as each of her friends depends on her to sort out the unflattering messes they make for themselves.
Yet behind her plain and patient facade, capable Mildred turns out to be a more ruthless social observer than even the anthropologists whose job it is to “study man.” Excellent Women is a romantic comedy that makes the decidedly unromantic suggestion that its narrator might be happiest alone. Mildred’s wit and independence subvert the stereotype that “excellent women” are dull. Set against the backdrop of postwar London, a city sorting through the disruptions of wartime bombing, the beginnings of feminism, and the end of colonialism, the novel offers effortless social critique that is as entertaining as it is enlightening.
ABOUT BARBARA PYM
English novelist Barbara Pym was born in 1913 in Shropshire. She was educated at Oxford and for many years worked at the African Institute in London. She enjoyed initial success in her writing career but then for over a decade was unable to find a publisher for her novels. After being called “the most underrated writer of the century” by Philip Larkin, there was a resurgence of critical and popular interest in her work in the final years of her life. She published six novels between 1950 and 1961, including Excellent Women in 1952, and four additional works after 1977. Among these later works is Quartet in Autumn, which was nominated for the Booker Prize. Pym died in 1980 at her home in Oxfordshire.
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