Excellent Women

Cheaper in another edition — £9.89 at LoveReading Excellent Women · See that edition →

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 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.

The cheapest new copy of Excellent Women is €21.40 at preigu DE. Prices checked 2 Nov 2026

Other editions

More by Barbara Pym

More by Barbara Pym