Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
I picked this one up out of perchance right before heading off to Nepal. I wanted my Kindle filled up for the plane and any possible off moment that I could take as reading time. In the end, this is the only book that I started and finished, reading it by the light of a flashlight at night in my sleeping bag. If I hadn’t been so tired at night after hiking for twelve hours, I probably would have stayed up all night to read it.
Excellent Women is written in first person, a point-of-view I usually dislike because very few people use it well. Barbara Pym is one of the few. While we get a closer look inside Midred’s head on what she is doing and why, it isn’t over the top and we don’t get every single one of her thoughts or emotions. In fact, since we are kept out of most of her emotions, the statements she makes about the people and her surroundings make a much bigger impact.
There are quite a few examples of this, but here are two of my favorite. She doesn’t tell us that she’s too lonely to make a big meal, instead she tells us the details of how small her meal is and the fact that she can’t be bothered to dress the lettuce. When Rocky comes back from the countryside, due to Midlred writing him about how much Helen wants him back, he is holding a bouquet of flowers. Midlred doesn’t tell us how these flowers made her heart stutter, instead she notices that the stems have been ripped off and not trimmed, as though Rocky grabbed them on the way to the train. An afterthought. In this the reader sees her emotions and her thoughts on being an afterthought for this man, but we are thankfully spared reading about the inner turmoil her heart might be having.
Excellent Women is a book of high comedy and does the trick of entertaining while tackling difficult social issues well. Mildred is a woman alone in the world after the war, with no parents and no husband, in her mid-thirties. She is comfortable with this situation and when we meet her she is getting used to living alone after her friend and roommate moved out and meeting the new neighbors. There are several women in the same position as Mildred in the parish, all willing to take lower jobs so the men can got back to work and fill their time volunteering at their parish. This makes them overlooked by most people, both men and women, around them. What makes this novel works is that Barbara Pym doesn’t make Mildrid whiny, instead she is a woman who understands her situation and accepts it whole-heartedly and is even quite comfortable with it, though at times she sees her future might have problems as a single woman. Still, she is willing to cast aside the assumptions of her friends thinking she’s in love with the unmarried vicar and wishes to marry, indeed they believe her to be seeking out marriage.
I love how Mildren is uncomfortable with the Napiers, the new neighbors, as she can see their marital issues even before they can, though she says nothing. And though she’s a single woman of little education, something Helen Napier is smug about, she isn’t afraid to be curious about anthropology and going to the talk. Once again, we are blessedly spared any over writing on Mildred’s emotions about her outings, but we are entertained by her observations when she does goes out which are infinitely more interesting and tell us much more about her and the emotional state she is in that having to read about her heart sizzling or skin turning to goose flesh.
The ending, since I’m quite keen to observe endings, is not at all what I would have expected. I had to remind myself that this books was written in the 1950s, so there was a different literary style then, one that works really well for this type of high comedy novel. But I have to admit that I went back and re-read it, just to really live in the last few seconds of the story. It’s wonderful how Mildred’s desire to be the only woman in Everard’s life helping him edit his papers is shone in such subtle details, culminating in her crying out that she’ll never learn with him answering that of course she will.
And there we see someone who sees Mildred for who she is: a smart, capable, curious woman who can edit scientific papers with the best of the other wives and who Everard very much sees. (Although personally I think he’s, in manly fashion, still taking advantage of her a bit.) I did love the ending for what it was, leaving the possibilities of their love and future open to the imagination of the reader. Any more than what it had would have extended the story unnecessarily and would have ruined the rhythm of the book.
Read my thoughts on judging a book by it’s cover next.