Barbara Pym's Excellent Women 1952

 I am tired, I said to myself, as I walked upstairs, and my face is quite grey.  Nobody must come near me.  I would have a rest this afternoon, for Winifred had gone back to the vicarage and was comforting Julian.  I felt a little sorry for him, surrounded as he would be by excellent women.  But at least he would be safe from people like Mrs. Gray; sister Blatt would defend him fiercely against all such perils, I knew.  Perhaps it might after all be my duty to marry him, if only to save him from being too well protected.

-- Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (Penguin, 1953)

One of the pleasures of reading the London Review of Books is discovering new authors, as I did when reading Alison Light's review of Paula Byrne's biography of Barbara Pym, a writer who was unfamiliar to me, though I was vaguely aware that Philip Larkin was an admirer of her novels.  Excellent Women is written in the first person by spinster Mildred Lathbury, daughter of a clergyman and very involved in volunteer work in and about her Anglican church.  The novel is very much of its time and place --post-WWII London -- but more relevant than ever for its clear-eyed role of women in society and their relationships with the men who run things.  Mildred mildly flirts with men, including Rocky Napier (who lives with his wife just below Mildred's apartment; they share a bathroom), anthropologist Everard Bone (a name that reminds one of one of the funniest moments in Howard Hawks's 1938 film Bringing Up Baby), and her clergyman Father Malory, who lives with his sister Winifred.  She also mourns an unrequited love from her youth and is determined never to marry, especially as she watches the diastrous attempted couplings around her.

Pym has been compared to Jane Austen, but I find her observant and comical views of everything, including the Church, to be more akin to the novels of Trollope, full of compassion and understanding. Mildred sees that people can act like fools and even admits she can at times be foolish herself, but she understands the complex reasons that sometimes we have little choice in our behavior. I find the title, Excellent Women, to be ironic, as often women have fewer choices than men.

As far as I can determine none of Pym's novels have been made into movies.  In their time they might have made excellent Ealing comedies; today's audience might find their wonderfully droll humor too subtle.