A Genteel Black Hole

Title: Excellent Women
Author: Barbara Pym
Year: 1952
Country: UK

Format: E-book
Pages: 304
Read: 20 – 30 January 2026
First reading

Mildred Lathbury is one of life’s “excellent women”, those ladies who devote their lives to Good Works and consequently get taken for granted. They make life run smoothly for the men around them, but never set anyone’s pulse racing. But Mildred’s humdrum life is suddenly complicated by the arrival of her new downstairs neighbours; anthropologist Helena Napier and her charming husband Rocky. The couple’s marriage is on the brink of collapse, and Helena pines instead for her anthropology colleague Everard Bone. Mildred finds herself drawn to the dazzlingly handsome Rocky, but remains wary of his (probably empty) charm—not to mention the impossibility of an affair with a married man.

I loved Barbara Pym’s debut novel, Some Tame Gazelle, so much that I picked up her second book almost immediately. The two books share much in common; they’re both bittersweet comedies of manners about spinsters who seem more comfortable at a safe distance from romance. One character from the first book even makes a cameo in this one! It definitely scratched my itch for more Pym, but I can’t help feeling I should’ve waited longer to read it. You can have too much of a good thing, and I think I read too much Pym in quick succession. As a result I didn’t enjoy this book nearly as much as it probably deserved. I still want to read more Pym, but first I’ll give myself a chance to start missing her.