Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym

This is published in the Penguin Classics series, and once you have read it you will understand why. It's a gem of a book, written in the 1950's, about the 'Excellent Women' who are there for others to lean on, always patiently offering a helping hand or a cup of tea, but neither considering, nor expecting to be considered for, marriage.

The heroine, Mildred Lathbury, the daughter of a deceased Church minister, is an unmarried thirty-something, a condition which in those days  meant that she was destined for spinsterhood. Miss Lathbury's life seems empty and so, when not working in a society dedicated to the support of impoverished gentlewomen, she seeks to fill her days by volunteering in the local church and generally supporting the various activities of the vicar, Julian Malory.

In a style evocative of Jane Austen, the author brilliantly describes the changes wrought in Mildred's life by the arrival of new tenants in the flat (apartment) beneath hers, Rockingham Napier and his wife, the circles into which she introduced, not to mention the blundering romantic misadventures of the vicar, Julian, and their effect on his spinster sister, Winfred, another one of the Excellent Women. Pym expertly draws you in to what might seem a trivially mundane world, and illuminating the intrigues that suffuse even the most prosaic of communities.

Excellent Women is character-driven, and relatively short on plot, but those characters are an absolute delight to discover. It is not a superficial novel, though, with Pym masterfully skewering our preconceptions and revealing universal truths about men and women and service. In the end we discover that Miss Lathbury's life is not, in fact, empty. How she fills her days are yours to discover in this highly recommended masterpiece. Five stars !