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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.
"Beneath the gentle surfaces of [Pym's] novels is a slow-building comedy, salt wit in a saline drip... . Her work offers the reassurance that we are all as bad and as good, as prickly and as resilient, as any Evensong attendee. It is a useful gratification in grating times." —The New York Times
"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." —The New Yorker
This information about Excellent Women (Penguin Classics) was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Barbara Pym (1913–1980)was a British novelist best known for her series of satirical novels on English middle-class society. A graduate of St. Hilda's College, Oxford, Pym published the first of her nine novels, Some Tame Gazelle, in 1950, followed by five more books. Despite this early success and continuing popularity, Pym went unpublished from 1963 to 1977. Her work was rediscovered after a famous article in the Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated Pym as the most underrated writer of the century. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize.
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