Excellent Women (book review)

Review from The Movie Snob

Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym. I was unacquainted with Pym’s work when I read a short magazine article praising her novels. So I decided to give her a try, and I found this novel at the local Borders bookstore. According to the cover blurb, it is "written with the wit and style of a twentieth century Jane Austen." I can’t go quite that far, but I enjoyed the story well enough. The setting is London shortly after WWII; the first-person narrator is a thirtyish woman named Mildred Lathbury whose unremarkable life principally revolves around her local Anglican church. Some newcomers on the local scene upset the quiet routine of Mildred’s life, particularly a couple with marital difficulties that moves into the flat below hers and a young, attractive widow who seems to have designs on the somewhat clueless bachelor vicar of Mildred’s church. The book is not bad, but it is really more interesting as a window into a vanished era than as a narrative. Among the cultural artifacts: the narrator chronically thinks of herself as a "spinster" simply because she is unmarried at age 30, the characters find the idea of the married couple’s getting divorced scarcely thinkable, and the local Anglican church is important, if not central, to the life of the surrounding community. It was truly a different world in those days.