Excellent Women

Excellent Women
Barbara Pym – Published 1952
Currently in Print and available from Amazon

I’ve known of Barbara Pym for many years. As a devoted Anglophile I had planned to read her work since I was an undergraduate in college in the 80s. Pym started writing in the 30s and worked steadily through the next 4 decades until, around 1963, her publisher rejected a manuscript and continued rejecting them through the rest of the 60s and 70s. Her career was revived with help from the poet Philip Larkin when he named her “the most underrated novelist of the century” in a Times Literary Supplement in 1977. She would live to enjoy her revitalized career and newly found fame only until 1980 when she succumbed to abdominal cancer.

Pym’s novels were generally considered comedic, although they took a bit of a darker turn later in life. Excellent Women was published in 1952 and was pretty typical of the Pym books of that period. It has been waiting to be read for some time now and that is why I’ve decided to use it as my first entry in this little experiment. Mildred Lathbury, the narrator of Excellent Women is a never-married woman in her 30s. She lives a spinsterish life in a dodgy part of post-war London. Her world is centered on her small church and her part-time job at the Society for the Care of Aged Gentlewomen. Mildred is a jewel. Funny and perceptive to an almost painful degree, she understands well how others see her.

“Platitudes flowed easily from me, perhaps because, with my parochial experience, I know myself to be capable of dealing with most of the stock situations or even the great moments of life- birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sale, the garden fete spoiled by bad weather...”

She is an excellent woman. One of those British stereotypes who is practical, hard-working, loyal and devout. The thing that makes Mildred such a wonderful character is her humor. She is funny as hell. Her observations, although made mostly to herself, are biting and perceptive and they are really what make this book shine.

“Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their story in the first person...”

There isn’t much of a plot. If there is social commentary it is wrapped up pretty tightly in a really droll examination of the day to day existence of the eccentric characters that inhabit Mildred’s world. That world is shaken by meeting her new neighbors, Helena and Rockingham Napier. The Napiers are exotic and foreign to Mildred. Helena is an anthropologist and Rocky is a dashing Naval officer. Mildred senses that the Napiers might provide an opportunity for her to shake things up a bit and indeed, they do.

Trying to describe the plot of this book is a dicey proposition. It’s difficult to convince contemporary readers that a book about a British church going spinster written decades ago has interest for a reader today. Times have certainly changed, but Pym’s writing is so tight, smart and funny that I found myself completely caught up in her small world. Many book jackets compare Pym to Jane Austen and while she certainly shares Austen’s wit, as well as her ability to write an interesting character, Pym’s narrative is much less romantic. Her characters will probably not ride off into the sunset with their true loves. They are much more likely to have a cup of tea or a tot of sherry and mentally debate if companionship is worth all of the effort and compromise that it seems to demand. While the ending of Excellent Women leaves one with hope that Mildred may find a way to expand her world and find companionship, there is certainly no HEA spelled out. I liked the honesty of Pym’s writing. There was little of the psychological hoo-hah that sometimes masquerades as character development in current fiction. Mildred is what she is. The world is what it is. Still, there is humor, friendship and a sense of community to be found in Pym’s world and I wholeheartedly recommend a visit.


http://www.barbara-pym.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Pym

I can't believe I'm doing this...

Welcome!

I can't believe I'm blogging. I feel sort of silly, but I've decided to try and motivate myself to read some books that I've collected through the years and the threat of public humiliation might just be enough to make me do it. I am a bibliophile. I love to buy books. I also love to read books. Since I tend to buy more books than I read I have decided to pull a dusty book of the shelf for the next 50 weeks or so and read it. Then I plan to share my thoughts on those books with anyone who cares to read this blog. Maybe you'll find some of the titles interesting. Maybe you'll discover some new authors. Maybe no one will ever read this except me, but at the end of the year I hope that I will have read some books that I might not have read otherwise. I'll be posting on my first book this weekend so if you are actually reading this, please check back.

See ya.