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Shop nowExcellent Women
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Learn moreExcellent 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.
Barbara Pym (1913-1980) was a bestselling and award-winning English novelist. Her first book, Some Tame Gazelle, launched her career as a writer beloved for her social comedies of class and manners. Pym is the only author to be named twice in a Times Literary Supplement list of "the most underrated novelists of the century." She produced thirteen novels, the last three published posthumously. Her 1977 novel Quartet in Autumn was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Jayne Entwistle is an award-winning audiobook narrator, winning both the Odyssey and Odyssey Honour Awards for her work in the young adult genre. When not narrating, she can be seen on screen in television shows such as The Good Place, The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, and You're the Worst. She is originally from the North of England.
Reviews
“Her most widely admired work…Cleanly crafted…A special treat for lovers of the high, wry style.”
“The fabulous Barbara Pym…is as witty and observant as Jane Austen and is very acute on male vanity.”
“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.”
“[One of] the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years.”
“[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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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