Excellent Women
A Washington Post Best Audiobook of 2016
A Slate Magazine Pick for the Best Audiobooks of 2016
An iBooks bestseller in Literature and Fiction
A Literary Hub Pick of 5 Mid-Century Commonwealth Writers You Should Read
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.
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