Excellent Women, Barbara Pym

I discovered Barbara Pym’s name on a list of authors you should read if you love Jane Austen. I love Jane Austen, so I made a beeline for my local library to find some Pym and Elizabeth Gaskell, another author mentioned in the list (I loved the TV productions of Gaskell’s North and South and Cranford). I’ll get to Gaskell in another post.

In Excellent Women, Mildred meets her neighbors who have some marital strife, her minister becomes engaged, and Mildred listens sympathetically, shares her observations with the reader, and makes tea. That's pretty much it.  Mildred is the same person at the end of the novel as she is at the start. There is never a point in the story where she has to make a serious decision or face more than a minor upset of her routine. Rather than a story arc, it is a story (straight) line. I looked in vain for that moment when Mildred’s story reveals something about the human condition or opens a new way of looking at a subject or…something. Mildred likes the life she has chosen. Good for her, but why should I care?

Excellent Women in written in first person narration.  It's Mildred's observations that we're meant to care about, but they did not seem especially keen or insightful.  Perhaps if the story were told in third person narration, the focus could have been pulled back and Mildred’s world expanded.  The reader would then be privy to the motivations and desires of some of the other characters and the story might have been richer. As it is, three-quarters of the way through I was ready to give up. The only thing that kept me going was the (futile) hope that Mildred would finally have some kind of revelation. Sadly, no.

Excellent Women is reputed to be wickedly funny. I don’t think so. I'll stay with Jane Austen. This book is also a reputed classic, and there was a time when I would have found a way to like it for that reason.  Happily, that day has passed.  I did not wholly feel that I had wasted my time with Barbara Pym and Excellent Women, but I am sure there are other authors whose work I will appreciate and enjoy more. I am also quite sure that I will not be reaching for anymore of Pym’s work.