Friday 10 June 2022

“Excellent Women“ by Barbara Pym - review


 “Excellent Women” by Barbara Pym:

Barbara Pym was an English writer who died in 1980 and was best known for her social comedies Excellent Women and A Glass Of Blessings. Her career suffered a long stretch of oblivion after her publisher dropped her quite brutally after her sixth novel. It was revived, though by the praises of the historian and biographer Lord David Cecil and the celebrated poet Philip Larkin who both claimed her to be the most under-rated writer of the century. Her novel Quartet in Autumn was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1977.


In a series of snapshots of human life Excellent Women is narrated by one of these typical English women Barbary Pym seems to be so much in favour of: spinsterly, smart, supportive, repressed, lonely, almost contented and resigned in their realization that their life has come to a still point with no perspective of future drastic change. The only exciting things happen outside of their own lives, in the parish they belong to, with the people they know there and with the dreary “good work“ they do to keep such a congregation and community going. 


Mildred Lathbury is one such woman, a clergyman’s daughter, a left-over spinster in the England of 1950. Through her we are drawn into the small habitat of a typical English parish and all the little excitement that comes with it. There are old neighbours and new neighbours, there is Rocky, a dashing young husband with a not-so-well-doing marriage, there is Julian Malory, the respectable and presentable vicar who almost gets lured into marriage by a clergyman’s widow but narrowly escapes. There are other spinster women friends and one or two might-be admirers which Mildred hardly considers as suitable or doesn’t even realize the true intentions with which they approach her.


All is written in low-key irony and as usual, a dark undercurrent of social mirroring of morality and class. And quite a dash of good English black humour, as exemplary in following passage:


Two office workers have a conversation on the topic of change:

“It’s rather pleasant to be unlike oneself occasionally.“

“I don’t agree. They moved me to a new office and I don’t like it at all. Different pigeons come to the windows”.


It is this thing about English humour, it delights in tiny little things, in the transforming of something ordinary into the extraordinary. As in A Glass Of BlessingExcellent Women is a most endearingly amusing very English novel, much in the spirit of Jane Austen’s society reflections. There is again a lot of interesting, sharp observation about the self-centred pomposity of men and all the details of smallish, distinctly English lives are laid out and form a parade of beautifully sketched minor egotists and misfits. A very good book. 


#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry

No comments:

Post a Comment

“Old God's Time“ by Sebastian Barry - review

  “Old God's Time” by Sebastian Barry: It is somewhere in the middle of the 1990s in Dalkey at the Irish sea and widower Tom Kettle, f...