Excellent Women [Paperback]

Barbara Pym (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1995

The heroines of "Excellent Women" and "A Glass of Blessings" complement each other and both books have ecclesiastical settings and preoccupations. Barbara Pym is the author of "Some Tame Gazelle", "Jane and Prudence" and "Less than Angels".

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An unqualifiedly great novel from the writer most likely to be compared to Jane Austen, this is a very funny, perfectly written book that can rival any other in its ability to capture the essence of its characters on the page. Mildred Lathbury, the narrator of Pym's excellent book is a never-married woman in her 30s--which in 1950s England makes her a nearly-confirmed spinster. Hers is a pretty unexciting life, centered around her small church, and part-time job. But Mildred is far more perceptive and witty than even she seems to think, and when Helena and Rockingham Napier move into the flat below her, there seems to be a chance for her life to take a new direction. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Review

Mildred Lathbury, the narrator of Excellent Women, is washing up after providing her neighbors with tea and yet another opportunity to impress their problems upon her. Mildred maintains a tolerant and wonderfully wry perspective on her supporting role in the melodramatic lives of others, but she has no desire to be "always making cups of tea at moments of crisis." In fact, she has complicated and often inappropriate ideas about her relationship to people around her. She examines the social psychology of each situation afterward as if she were inspecting a soapy cup for lingering stains: "My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the 'stream of consciousness' type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink." Excellent Women, however, goes beyond Mildred's introspection to include a bevy of curates, anthropologists, gossips, and ingrates in parochial, academic, and domestic contexts. In Barbara Pym's fiction, the preoccupations are petty, the daydreams disappointing, the romance unromantic, and the intelligent woman who does all the work is bound to be unappreciated. Oddly enough, these elements add up to delightful reading. Honesty, insight, feminism, and some terribly funny remarks are hidden among the teacups and conversations. If you are patient with Excellent Women you may discover an entirely unexpected story sandwiched between the lines. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Kirsten Backstrom

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Pan Books (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330335049
• ISBN-13: 978-0330335041
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,074,279 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

87 of 89 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Witty, perceptive, belongs on a syllabus somewhere, November 20, 2000

By 

C. Ebeling "ctlpareader" (PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Excellent Women (Paperback)

Don't leap to the assumption that a book written fifty years ago about an unmarried do-gooding gentle woman would have nothing for a contemporary audience. Despite its London church parish setting well populated with the spinsterish "excellent women" of the title, Pym's book delivers sharp observations about men and women, together and apart, and society's expectations for all. Her truths are pungent a sexual revolution later.

Relevancy aside, this is a good read. Pym lays out her well-defined world much as Jane Austen does, providing a critical and always witty tour. The characters are drawn as sharply as any Austen delivered. The novel is entertaining but rewardingly complex as it probes not only gender and social mores but also asks if Mildred Lathbury, the protagonist and narrator, is choosing the life of an excellent woman or if she is saddled with it. To use a contemporary phrase, it is about having a life, and this deceivingly gentle-seeming book is asking questions that are as rugged and significant as any asked in our less regulated times.

43 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mellow fruitfulness, June 18, 2007

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Excellent Women (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

There are certain books that really can't be fully appreciated until you're older and can bring to them the understanding of maturity: Henry James's "major phase" novels, for example, and perhaps Jane Austen's MANSFIELD PARK. A writer whose talents completely eluded me when I was younger was Barbara Pym; her world of elderly churchgoers and celibate vicars in postwar England seemed too grim to me when I was in my early twenties, and I saw her novels as tragedies rather than as the brilliant comedies they really are. EXCELLENT WOMEN fully deserves its current reissue status in the Penguin Classics series because it really IS a twentieth-century English classic. Its title has famously come to describe a certain kind of character to which Barbara Pym thoroughly lays claim as an author, and is thus often considered the most emblematic of Pym's works (it is certainly one of the funniest).

The comic genius of the novel is not that its heroine, the respectable and virginal and shabby-genteel Mildred Lathbury, is unwanted by her society, as I misunderstood when I was in graduate school, when I first read the novel. Rather, she is TOO much in demand, and not only is of great use to the church officials who want her to shine the brass of their decaying pews, but also of the confused married neighbors in her lodgings and even the few bachelors she knows (who subtly feel her out for her interest in marrying them--overtures which she always curtails). Although Mildred is puzzled by the work of the anthropologists she meets, she is herself too much of an anthropologist ever to commit to married life (or even sharing a room with another spinster friend). Her constant self-deprecation is always offset by her unspoken understanding that her life is far too rich in its observations of others for her to subsume her ego fully into another's needs. Pym has been frequently compared to Jane Austen, and the comparisons are quite just, though it should be noted that her work is more like the more autumnal and scathing PERSUASION than the giddy exuberance of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The classic Barbara Pym novel, September 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Excellent Women (Paperback)

Barbara Pym is an author who has gained in reputation since her death, and "Excellent Women" is the epitome of her writing. A comic novel with a delicate touch, it loses nothing by being set in the 1950s. We recognise the characters and situations. For me, the understated romance between Mildred Lathbury and Everard Bone carries echoes of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice". I defy any woman not to enjoy it.