Excellent Women
By Barbara PymIntroduction by A. N. Wilson
By Barbara PymIntroduction by A. N. Wilson
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$16.00
Published on Dec 26, 2006 | 256 Pages
Published on Dec 26, 2006 | 256 Pages
“The finest introduction to Barbara Pym” (The New York Times): a hilarious comedy of manners by the shrewdly observant British novelist often compared to Jane Austen
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 who 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.
Author
Barbara Pym
A writer from the age of sixteen, Barbara Pym has been acclaimed as “the most underrated writer of the century” (Philip Larkin). Pym’s substantial reputation evolved through the publication of six novels from 1950 to 1961, then resumed in 1977 with the publication of Quartet in Autumn and three other novels. She died in 1980.
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