Excellent Women (Penguin Classics)

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 Pyms richest and most amusing high comedies, Excellent Womenhas at its center Mildred Lathbury, a clergymans 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 neighborsanthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next doorthe novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.