Excellent Women

One of Barbara Pym's richest and most amusing high comedies, Excellent Women has at its center Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman's daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those "excellent women," the smart, supportive, repressed women whom men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors, the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.