num_pages: 231
description: Excellent Women is one of Barbara Pym's richest and most amusing high comedies. 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 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.
language: English
title: Excellent Women
titlecomplete: Excellent Women
characters: Julian Malory, Rockingham Napier, Allegra Gray, Helena Napier, William Caldicote, Dora Caldicote, Mildred Lathbury, Sister Blatt, Winifred Malory, Everard Bone, Esther Clovis
genres: Classics, British Literature, Humor, Novels, Historical Fiction, 20th Century, Audiobook, Literary Fiction, Fiction, Womens
ratings_count: 16753
places: London, England, England
publisher: Penguin Classics