Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

"The finest introduction to Barbara Pym" (The New York Times): a hilarious comedy of manners by the shrewdly observant British novelist often compared to Jane Austen

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.

BARBARA PYM, a writer from the age of sixteen, has been dubbed the most undervalued writer of the century (Philip Larkin). Pym's illustrious name grew during the course of six books published between 1950 and 1961, then restarted in 1977 with the publication of Quartet in Autumn and three additional works. In 1980, she passed away.