Recommendations
Books Like Excellent Women
Quiet Comic Novels Like Excellent Women
Barbara Pym's Excellent Women is one of the great quiet comedies in the English language — Mildred Lathbury observing the lives around her with dry, affectionate precision in her London parish. These 8 novels share its understated wit, its portrait of intelligent women navigating social worlds that underestimate them, and its conviction that the most ordinary lives contain the most interesting dramas.
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A Glass of Blessings
by Barbara Pym
Wilmet Forsyth, a bored but comfortable married woman in an Anglo-Catholic parish — the natural companion to Excellent Women in Pym's work; where Mildred is modest and perceptive, Wilmet is oblivious and pampered, making her an equally precise comic portrait; recommended immediately after Excellent Women
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The Millstone
by Margaret Drabble
Rosamund Stacey's fierce independence when she becomes pregnant and decides to manage alone — Drabble's novel shares Excellent Women's portrait of a capable, intelligent, unmarried English woman who refuses the social role assigned to her, its dry first-person voice, and its comedy about the gap between the life one is expected to lead and the life one actually manages
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark
Miss Jean Brodie and her 'crème de la crème' at the Marcia Blaine School — Spark's finest novel shares Excellent Women's portrait of an exceptional woman navigating a world that has no adequate category for her, its precise, malicious comedy, and its interest in the way that female intelligence expresses itself when the conventional outlets are blocked; Spark's tone is colder and more dangerous than Pym's but the formal precision is comparable
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Cranford
by Elizabeth Gaskell
The community of women in the fictional town of Cranford — Gaskell's short novel is one of the ancestors of the world Excellent Women depicts: a community organized around the social lives of women, observed with warmth and comedy, in which the absence of men is a fact of life rather than a tragedy; Pym is the twentieth-century version of Gaskell's nineteenth-century social comedy
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Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
by Winifred Watson
Governess Guinevere Pettigrew's one extraordinary day in 1930s London — Watson's long-lost 1938 novel shares Excellent Women's portrait of a genteel single woman who suddenly finds her life transformed by a single day's events, its comedy, and its affectionate portrait of the world of women who exist at the margins of the fashionable world they observe; rediscovered by Persephone Books in 2000
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The Diary of a Provincial Lady
by E.M. Delafield
A country lady's diary of her daily life — Delafield's 1930 comic novel shares Excellent Women's dry, self-deprecating first-person voice, its comedy about the gap between aspiration and reality in a woman's daily life, and its portrait of a world in which social forms and small humiliations are the substance of existence; the direct precursor to Pym's comedy in the parish
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Quartet in Autumn
by Barbara Pym
Four aging office workers facing retirement alone — Pym's late masterpiece is the darker companion to Excellent Women; where Mildred's life is sustained by the parish and its social comedy, the four characters in Quartet in Autumn face loneliness and old age with less social support; recommended for readers who have loved Excellent Women and want to follow Pym into her more desolate late manner
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Miss Read: Village School
by Miss Read
The village teacher at Fairacre School — Miss Read's autobiographical fiction (written by Dora Saint under a pseudonym) shares Excellent Women's portrait of a single professional woman in a small English community, its gentle social comedy, and its conviction that a quiet life well-observed is as rich and interesting as any more dramatic alternative; recommended for readers who want something entirely without darkness
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