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Excellent Women is one of Barbara Pym’s richest and most amusing high comedies. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman’s daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those "excellent women," the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets... (learn more about this book)
'Quartet In Autumn' is the story of four people in late middle-age who work in the same office and who all suffer from loneliness. Poignantly and with humour, Pym takes us through their small lives and the facades they erect to defend themselves against the outside world.
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Middle-aged Jane is the well-intentioned but far from perfect clergyman's wife and mother. Prudence, who at 29 is teetering at the edge of spinsterhood, is an attractive, educated working girl. The two best friends share memories of their carefree days at Oxford, leisurely lunches, and gossip,... (learn more about this book)
Barbara Pym is a master at capturing the subtle mayhem that takes place in the apparent quiet of the English countryside. Fifty-something sisters Harriet and Belinda Bede live a comfortable, settled existence. Belinda, the quieter of the pair, has for years been secretly in love with the... (learn more about this book)
An Unsuitable Attachment is set in a parish outside of London. There the novel's "unattached" characters work out a confusing web of matchmaking and forming attachments. A new eligible bachelor in the neighborhood, Rupert Stonebird, finds himself choosing between two very different... (learn more about this book)
Pym introduces Dulcie Mainwaring, one of those seemingly selfless women who always help others and never look out for themselves, especially in matters of love. When Dulcie's young niece becomes the object of absentminded Professor Aylwin Forbes's amorous designs, Dulcie whisks away her friend... (learn more about this book)
Completed barely two months before her death, Pym's last novel is an incisive and wry portrait of life in an English village in Oxfordshire. It is also certain to be considered by many her masterwork. In A Few Green Leaves the author combines the rural setting of her earliest... (learn more about this book)
Unsuitable romance is the theme of this wickedly comedic novel. A series of entanglements brings together an odd assortment of characters - clergymen, university dons, naive students, and academic hangers-on - with hilarious results.
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Well dressed, well looked after, suitably husbanded, good looking and fairly young. Wilmet Forsyth is most, if not all of those things. No matter that Rodney, the handsome army major, working nine thirty to six at the Ministry, is slightly balder and fatter than he once was. Wilmet would like... (learn more about this book)
Over Barbara Pym's 30-year writing career her primary subject was the intricate rituals of English life, which she observed with a sharp but understanding eye. Her novels now enjoy a devoted following and belated recognition as classics of the British comic novel. In The Sweet Dove Died ,... (learn more about this book)