Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

It was not clear as to what it was that Mrs. Morris had seen coming, but I decided that we had talked enough about it.  Was I then to marry Julian?  Was that what she had seen coming?  Would he propose to me, after a decent interval, of course, and should we make a match of it and delight the parish?  It sounded ideal, but somehow morning had not brought any more enthusiasm than the night before.  I still thought of myself as one of the rejected ones and I could not believe that he loved me anymore than I loved him.  Of course I liked and admired him, perhaps I even respected and esteemed him, as Everard Bone did Esther Clovis.  But was that enough?  In any case, it was indecent, wicked, almost, to be thinking of such things now.  There must surely be some practical help I could give.

Mildred Lathbury is a thirty-something spinster who lives a quiet life.  Her social calendar includes visiting with the vicar Julian Malory and his sister Winifred, and organizing church jumble sales.  She has never really been in love, and finds spinsterhood satisfying enough; being single allows her maximum freedom to help the church and other people.  All that is thrown into disarray--a very polite and mild disarray, a very British disarray--thanks to a series of upheavals: Julian's engagement to a suspicious interloper, and the arrival of the Napiers, a tempestuously married couple, in the apartment upstairs from Mildred.

Excellent Women is the story of all the myriad ways that Mildred gets taken advantage of.  Julian and his fiancee are keen on kicking Julian's sister Winifred out of the small apartment where they've been living and having her move in with Mildred.  The Napiers, Rocky and Helena, put Mildred in the middle of their spats, even to the point of convincing her to manage a battle over furniture after they inevitably separate.  Helena's friend Everard, a prickly anthropologist, shows up outside of Helena's office without warning demanding lunch dates.  And every other person in Mildred's orbit is certain that she'll eventually get married, though their opinion differs as to whether she "belongs" to Julian and his fiancee has rudely usurped her, or whether she's destined for Everard Bone, or perhaps even in love with the dashing but shallow Rocky.  Mildred never gets more than inwardly piqued about the way that others presume on her good will, and always does whatever she can to help.

You hear Pym compared to Jane Austen a lot, and if this were a Jane Austen novel, you might expect that Everard Bone really is a Mr. Darcy type, and that eventually he'll soften up and declare his love for Mildred, but instead he asks her to come over and cook a roast for him.  There's at least two couples I assume are secret lesbians, including Everard's mother and her mysterious (and never mentioned again) friend "Miss Jessop."  Maybe instead of wondering why she doesn't feel love for Julian, when everyone thinks they're a perfect match, Mildred ought to be examining how much she misses her old friend Dora, who's moved out the country?  I think you probably could read this as a very blackhearted satire on the way that patriarchy enlists women into their own ill treatment.  The irony is buried deep, but so, I suppose, is Mildred's sense of self, beneath layers of social conditioning.

But when the irony is buried so deep, it's easy not to notice it at all, and the experience of reading Excellent Women can seem superficial and provincial: a novel mostly about making and having tea.  It certainly feels like a genteel little comedy of manners about a criminally uninteresting woman.  My favorite part is a throwaway bit about how Everard's senile mother hates all birds and thinks they're conspiring against people.  ("'The Dominion of the Birds,' she went on.  'I very much fear it may come to that.'")  I would have enjoyed a novel about Everard's bird-hating lesbian mom much more, i think.