‘Excellent Women’ (1952) is probably the best-known novel by Barbara Pym (1913-1980).

It deals with the humdrum middle class existence of one Mildred Lathbury, part-time charity worker and pillar of the local church.

She mostly interacts with the vicar and his sister, two new neighbours and a spare anthropologist.

These characters revolve around each other while not very much happens. Meanwhile, Mildred reflects upon them, and upon her own condition.

I suppose one would describe it as a faintly funny comedy of manners, heavily redolent of genteel life in Postwar London.

Mildred makes a few memorably wry observations and a handful of literary allusions.

But it is a stretch to claim, as Alexander McCall Smith does on the front cover, that this is ‘one of the most endearingly amusing English novels of the Twentieth Century’.

Though eminently readable, I found it superficial and, ultimately, almost pointless.

TD

June 2023