BARBARA PYM AND HER EXCELLENT WOMEN

Credit: Andrew Whittuck

Lovely essay by Hannah Rosefield on attending a meeting of the Barbara Pym Society in Boston and a peek into Pym's novels.  I have them all, and I've read them more than once, always with delight in her fine prose style and smiles at her wit, which sometimes bites and at other times is tinged with rue.

As Rosefield says, 'Mildred is one of the “excellent women” of her novel’s title: efficient, virtuous and uncomplaining, expecting little and receiving little. Her clergyman father has died, and she lives in reduced circumstances in London, where she works part time for the Society for the Care of Distressed Gentlewomen (“a cause very near to my own heart, as I felt that I was just the kind of person who might one day become one”).'

Pym is quite often not generous to her male characters, as Rosefield says, "The very names of Pym’s male characters (Rockingham Napier, Alaric Lydgate) make it clear that they are better as romantic fantasies than as husbands." My favorite name is Everard Bone, the anthropologist, a character in "Excellent Women".

Rosefield describes the few of Pym's excellent women who marry, as opposed to the many who remain spinsters, as "married spinsters".