I have just finished Barbara Pym’s novel Excellent Women over a cup of tea, in somebody else’s home whilst marooned in London due to snow, and just for a moment, albeit a short one, I identified with its heroine, the inestimable Mildred Lathbury. I am happy, but not quite settled. I take the view that a cup of tea solves most problems but I know that it doesn’t solve them all. I am looking around at the snow caked city and thinking – well – let’s just wait and see.Mildred is a bit like that. She is the narrator of this excellent novel in which she reveals her character and her place in the world by gentle turns and subtle humour. Mildred is a clergyman’s daughter who has found herself over 30 and unmarried in an age when that usually meant that you could forget your chances in the marriage market. She is not at all rich but she is firmly middle class. She lives in a flat which shares its bathroom with others. She is extremely churchy – her closest friends being the local vicar and his spinster sister. Mildred volunteers and helps and sorts and mucks in and is generally a self contained, self sufficient woman upon whom everyone seems to depend.
Enter stage right a considerable amount of disturbance in the form of Mildred’s new neighbours, Rockingham “Rocky” and Helena Napier. Helena is a spirited anthropologist who is more interested in the origins of civilisation than in being a “proper” wife 1950s style. This state of affairs has poor Mildred completely flummoxed, not least because Mrs Napier’s husband Rocky is rather lovely. He has spent the war in Italy – Mildred imagines charming Wrens.
This book is largely about the distinction – now very little but then a vast chasm – between married and unmarried women. At the beginning of the book, Mildred comments disarmingly “Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women, who tell their stories in the first person”. That is to say - reader don’t expect an “I married him” moment.
The distinctions which Pym illustrates have mostly to do with status and position. One that really fascinates is the dividing of the married and the unmarried between the passive observers and the active non-observers. According to one of her fellow unmarrieds: “We, my dear Mildred, are the observers of life. Let other people get married by all means, the more the merrier”. He lifted the bottle, judged the amount left in it and refilled his own glass but not mine. “Let Dora marry if she likes. She hasn’t your talent for observation”.
Other excellent opinions are to be found at Dovegreyreader, the Red Room library and the wonderful My Porch. I have included a picture of the front cover of the latest Virago edition, and the lady herself, together with a slightly grumpy looking cat.