Excellent Women – Barbara Pym
I really enjoyed reading Jane and Prudence, so when I was off for a resort holiday I thought I definitely need to read a Pym novel. I love them – all that talk about clothes and hats and food and the tea drinking …
Here is the blurb …
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.
These women – single, a bit frumpy, in distressed circumstances – are expected to do all of the drudgery (make the tea, do the flowers even paint walls when the vicar proves to be inept). It is a quietly funny novel, but with an underlying feel of loneliness or unhappiness.
More reviews …
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/apr/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview30