Excellent Women

Summary

Excellent Women is narrated by Mildred Lathbury, an unmarried clergyman's daughter just past thirty, living in a shabby part of London near Victoria in the austere years after the Second World War. She works part-time for a society aiding impoverished gentlewomen and devotes herself to her parish church, St Mary's, where she helps the unmarried vicar, Julian Malory, and his sister Winifred. Mildred is one of the 'excellent women' of the title, the capable, self-effacing spinsters on whom churches, families and men depend without much noticing them. Her quiet life is disrupted when new tenants move into the flat below hers, sharing her bathroom: Helena Napier, a brisk, untidy anthropologist, and her husband Rockingham, a handsome, charming former naval officer who spent the war in Italy organising the social life of an admiral's Wrens. The Napiers' marriage is failing, and Mildred becomes the confidante of both. Through Helena she meets Everard Bone, a reserved, somewhat priggish anthropologist with whom Helena is half in love; Mildred finds herself drawn to him despite herself. Meanwhile the parish is unsettled by the arrival of Allegra Gray, an attractive clergy widow who takes a flat in the vicarage and becomes engaged to Julian, to Mildred's ambiguous relief and the dismay of parishioners who had assumed Julian would marry Mildred. Everyone treats Mildred as a resource: the Napiers ask her to manage their quarrels, their separation and the division of their furniture; Allegra plans to turn Winifred out of the vicarage, and Mildred must take her in; Everard invites her to learned society meetings and seems to want her to proofread and index for him. The engagement collapses once Allegra's plan to push Winifred out of the vicarage comes into the open, and the Napiers reconcile and move to the country. At the end, Mildred reflects wryly that she may yet have a 'full life', with Julian, Everard and the parish all needing her, and with the hint that Everard's need for an indexer may develop into something more. The novel is a comedy of tea, jumble sales and church politics, but also a sharp, sad study of loneliness, female labour and the expectations placed on single women.

Top Lessons

• Invisible labour

  Mildred's competence makes her indispensable and overlooked. Pym exposes how communities rely on women's unpaid emotional and practical work.

• Comedy of small things

  Pym finds drama in tea, jumble sales and the sharing of a bathroom. The novel shows how small social details reveal character and power.

• Choosing one's own life

  The ending suggests that Mildred may be able to shape a fuller life, but on terms still set by others. The book asks how much choice single women had in postwar England.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Little medical content; the novel's interest for a psychiatric reader lies in its quiet portrait of loneliness and of tea and routine as everyday consolations.