Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

Excellent Women

Author: Barbara Pym

Narrator: Jayne Entwistle

Unabridged: 8 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/15/2016

Synopsis

Excellent Women is one of Barbara Pym’s richest and most amusing high comedies. This is Barbara Pym’s world at its funniest.Mildred Lathbury is 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—anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door—the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.

About Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym (1913–1980) was an English novelist educated at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Her novels, on the surface a comedy of manners of village life, looked deeply at the relationships between men and women. When in 1977 the Times Literary Supplement (London) asked critics to name the most underrated authors of the previous seventy-five years, Barbara Pym was the only one named by two critics. After sixteen years between published novels, her Quartet in Autumn was treated as a major literary event and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Reviews

Goodreads review by MsAprilVincent on May 09, 2009

Aside from a few differences--living in the 1950s, being British, not being a teacher, being actively involved in church--Mildred Lathbury could easily be me. She's in her early 30s, she's unmarried, people keep telling her about their problems and expecting her to fix them, men think she's in love......more

Goodreads review by Fabian on April 10, 2020

With a sweetness reminiscent of Edith Wharton's gorgeous classic "The Age of Innocence," "Excellent Women" is proof, not solely of female excellence, but of the overall human goodness. Nothing short of miraculous, this novel about a wallflower who knows just how shitty men can often treat their coun......more

Goodreads review by Kelly on July 26, 2016

This review first appeared on my blog Shoulda Coulda Woulda Books. Awhile ago, I asked for recommendations for books that take place in small villages. I'd just done a re-read of Emma and followed that up with An Accomplished Woman, and I was really enjoying the scale of the worlds and the consequent......more

Goodreads review by Claire on July 12, 2020

Why didn't any of you shout louder about reading Barbara Pym? I can't believe I'm nearly 50 and I've only just got round to reading her, because everything was perfect and lovely and wonderful about this book. So beautifully English. An 'ordinary' single woman, Mildred, in the 1950s, goes to church,......more

Goodreads review by Kim on June 07, 2016

I am re-reading Barbara Pym's books this summer to lift my spirits as I recover from physical injury. I find I can only take so much emotional stress before I retreat to her closely observed lives full of the quotidian routines of the women who are the backbone of the Anglican Church. Flower arrangi......more

Quotes

“Oh, happy day! One of Barbara Pym’s subtly comic novels has finally been produced in an audio version. Pym has been called heir to Jane Austen, her observations possessing a similar undercurrent of wicked irony…Jayne Entwistle delivers Mildred’s story in a proper, well-brought-up English voice—reticent, obliging, sometimes wondering—making this production a perfect joy.” Washington Post (audio review)

“[One of] the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years.” Lord David Cecil, New York Times bestselling author

“[Pym] is a shrewd observer of a certain kind of middle-class woman, no longer young and not quite beautiful, whom society finds it easy to overlook. And she is just as shrewd an observer of the people that these women, vigilant and perceptive, themselves observe….[in] Excellent Women, Pym’s most famous and most perfect novel.” New York Times

“A startling reminder that solitude may be chosen and that a lively, full novel can be constructed entirely within the precincts of that regressive virtue, feminine patience.” New Yorker

“Pym brings Lathbury into sharp focus, and we come away with a great sympathy and affection for her. Are you interested, as I am, in the complicated emotional dynamics of a small town church jumble sale? It’s Barbara Pym to the rescue.” Literary Hub

“Her most widely admired work…Cleanly crafted…A special treat for lovers of the high, wry style.” Kirkus Reviews

“The fabulous Barbara Pym…is as witty and observant as Jane Austen and is very acute on male vanity.” Paula Byrne, author of Kick

“What stays longest with the reader once the amusement, the satire, the alert ear, and exact eye have all been acknowledged? Partly it is the underlying loneliness of life…the absence of self-pity, the scrupulousness of one’s relations with others.” Philip Larkin, English poet and novelist

Awards

  • Washington Post Best Audiobook
  • Slate Magazine Pick
  • iBooks bestseller
  • Literary Hub Pick
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