Excellent Women

Today we’re discussing Barbara Pym’s second novel, Excellent Women, published in 1952. Pym wrote mid-century comedies of manners and experienced some success in the first decade of her career and then struggled to publish new novels. Excellent Women certainly has a Miss Bates style heroine, but uniquely has a romance-style happy ending, if you agree that the match Mildred Lathbury makes has the potential for happiness. Barbara Pym was not a romance novelist and most of her works focus on a generation of gentlewomen just young enough to feel the loss of a vast number of potential marriage partners from World War II, but old enough (and backwards looking enough) that they aren’t able to parlay new social and gender class mobility into rewarding professions. They, like Miss Bates, exist in, if not a genteel poverty, a genteel bourgeois existence. They may be the daughters of vicars, but have little hope of getting the vicar to marry them. Pym is writing at the same time as authors like Barbara Cartland and Victoria Holt, cited as precedents for a lot of genre romance fiction we read today. And if Jane Austen is another grand precedent of romance fiction, Pym is at least a cousin.

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