Excellent Women
About this audiobook
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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About the author
Barbara Pym (1913–1980) was an English novelist educated at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Her novels, on the surface a comedy of manners of village life, looked deeply at the relationships between men and women. When in 1977 the Times Literary Supplement (London) asked critics to name the most underrated authors of the previous seventy-five years, Barbara Pym was the only one named by two critics. After sixteen years between published novels, her Quartet in Autumn was treated as a major literary event and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.
Jayne Entwistle is a voice talent and Earphones Award–winning narrator.
