Excellent Women

Barbara Pym
3.91
19,590 ratings 2,856 reviews
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.
Genres: FictionClassicsHumorBritish LiteratureHistorical FictionBook ClubAudiobook20th CenturyNovelsLiterary Fiction
256 Pages

Community Reviews:

5 star
5477 (28%)
4 star
8302 (42%)
3 star
4592 (23%)
2 star
991 (5%)
1 star
228 (1%)

Readers also enjoyed

Other books by Barbara Pym

Lists with this book

Pride and Prejudice
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Handmaid’s Tale
Jezebel's Books All Women Should Read
771 books • 1401 voters
Rebecca
I Capture the Castle
The Enchanted April
A Middlebrow Syllabus
100 books • 71 voters
North and South
Wives and Daughters
Lady Susan / The Watsons / Sanditon
More Jane for the Austen Purist
149 books • 137 voters
The Catcher in the Rye
Fahrenheit 451
Lord of the Flies
Best Books of the Decade: 1950s
1190 books • 1499 voters