Excellent Women [School & Library Binding]

Barbara Pym (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1988

Mildred Lathbury is one of those 'excellent women' who is often taken for granted. She is a godsend, 'capable of dealing with most of the stock situations of life - birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sales, the garden fete spoilt by bad weather'. As such, she often gets herself embroiled in other people's lives - especially those of her glamorous new neighbours, the Napiers, whose marriage seems to be on the rocks. One cannot take sides in these matters, though it is tricky, especially as Mildred, teetering on the edge of spinsterhood, has a soft spot for dashing young Rockingham Napier. This is Barbara Pym's world at its funniest and most touching.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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 the Mass Market Paperback edition.

Review

One of the most endearingly amusing English novels of the twentieth century Alexander McCall Smith One of the finest examples of high comedy Lord David Cecil I don't think I've ever before recommended a novel as one that everybody will enjoy and yet - even with a certain assurance - I'm prepared to vouch for EXCELLENT WOMEN Marghanita Laski, OBSERVER I pick up her books with joy, as though I were meeting an old, dear friend who comforts me, extends my vision and makes me roar with laughter Jilly Cooper --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• School & Library Binding
• Publisher: San Val (May 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1417624132
• ISBN-13: 978-1417624133
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,251,388 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 (Mass Market 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 (Mass Market 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.