Reading Order
Excellent Women Reading Order
Barbara Pym's Excellent Women (1952) is a standalone novel narrated by Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman's daughter in her early thirties who lives alone in a London flat and is perpetually enlisted by the people around her — the charming new neighbors Rockingham and Helena Napier, the retiring vicar Everard Bone — to be useful in ways she has not chosen. One of the great comic novels in the English tradition and perhaps the finest of Pym's seven-novel career.
Where to start
Excellent Women
Complete Excellent Women Book List
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Excellent Women
Barbara Pym·1952·The complete novel. Entirely standalone, though some characters appear in other Pym novels. - Buy
A Glass of Blessings
OptionalBarbara Pym·1958·Wilmet Forsyth, a bored but comfortable married woman in a London Anglo-Catholic parish — Pym's fifth novel and many readers' second favorite after Excellent Women; where Mildred is modest and perceptive, Wilmet is oblivious and pampered, making her an equally precise comic portrait from a different angle. - Buy
Quartet in Autumn
OptionalBarbara Pym·1977·Four aging office workers facing retirement alone — Pym's first novel after her literary rediscovery in 1977 (she had been out of print for thirteen years); darker and more desolate than Excellent Women but showing her full range as she deals with loneliness, old age, and the Anglican church in a minor key. - Buy
Some Tame Gazelle
OptionalBarbara Pym·1950·Belinda and Harriet Bede, two spinster sisters in a village, managing their lives and the men around them — Pym's debut novel; written before Excellent Women but sharing its comedy, its parish world, and its portrait of women who have arranged satisfying lives outside the conventional expectations of marriage and romance.
Excellent Women — Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Mildred Lathbury, and what makes her such a memorable narrator?
Mildred Lathbury is one of the great narrators in the English comic tradition — funny, dry, precise, self-deprecating, and possessed of a penetrating social intelligence that she deploys without malice. She describes herself as an 'excellent woman' — the kind of capable, single, Anglican woman who can be relied upon to arrange flowers, comfort the distressed, and be useful in a hundred ways that will never be adequately acknowledged. Her comedy comes from the gap between this self-description and her actual observations, which are frequently devastating in their accuracy. She notices everything and judges discreetly, deploying her intelligence in small, precise observations about the behavior of the people around her rather than in any larger project. Her narration is particularly effective in its handling of the 'excellent woman' role that the people around her expect her to fill: she accepts it with a grace that the reader gradually understands is neither passive nor approving, but a form of clear-eyed accommodation to the social world she inhabits.
Why was Barbara Pym out of print for thirteen years?
Barbara Pym published six novels between 1950 and 1961, all received with warm critical reviews and a devoted readership. In 1963 her seventh novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, was rejected by Jonathan Cape, her longtime publisher, who told her that her work no longer fit the literary mood of the 1960s — an era of social upheaval, experimentation, and novels that announced their ambitions loudly. Pym spent the next thirteen years unable to find a publisher for her work. The rediscovery came in 1977, when both Philip Larkin and David Cecil named her, independently, in a Times Literary Supplement poll asking who were the most underrated novelists of the century. The attention prompted the publication of Quartet in Autumn (1977) and The Sweet Dove Died (1978); Quartet in Autumn was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She died of cancer in 1980, two years after her literary restoration. The thirteen-year gap is now understood as one of the more egregious acts of critical misjudgment in twentieth-century British publishing.
How does Excellent Women relate to Jane Austen?
Barbara Pym is often compared to Jane Austen, and with Excellent Women the comparison is most apt. Like Austen, Pym constructs her comic world around the social microcosm of a particular English community (in Pym's case, the Anglo-Catholic parish), within which small social interactions carry enormous weight; like Austen, she deploys an ironic narrative voice that sees through the pretensions of everyone around her narrator without being malicious; and like Austen, her comic world is populated by women who must negotiate a social landscape that underestimates them. The differences are also revealing: Pym's England is postwar and urban, not Regency and rural; her comedy is more desolate because her women have less hope of the marriage plot that gives Austen's heroines their destination; and her church is Anglo-Catholic rather than Church of England, which adds a particular kind of ritualized social comfort to the proceedings. Pym is best understood as what Austen became when she moved to London, lost her faith in romantic love, and discovered the consolations of very good tea.
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