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G is Currently Reading

G L is currently reading

Excellent Women

by Barbara Pym

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 3rd time

read in March 2024

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G L said: " “I suppose it was cowardly of me, but I felt that I wanted to be alone, and what better place to choose than the sink, where neither of the men would follow me.”

"It was the middle of August now, a difficult time in the church. There were, as Rocky ha “I suppose it was cowardly of me, but I felt that I wanted to be alone, and what better place to choose than the sink, where neither of the men would follow me.”

"It was the middle of August now, a difficult time in the church. There were, as Rocky had pointed out, all those Sundays after Trinity. Even the highest church could not escape themm, and it was sometimes difficult to remember whether we were at Trinity 8, 9, or 10.... There was no sermon on Sunday mornings, and little things seemed to go wrong. Sparks came out of the censer, and alarmed some of the older members of the congregation. One of the little acolytes tripped over his too-long cassock and fell down the steps, causing the others to dissolve into giggles. One Sunday...it was the organist's holiday too, and Sister Black made a valiant attempt to take his place, those peculiarly unnerving noises that only a church organ can produce would keep bursting out."

"'I don't know how I'm going to find time to do it,' said Everard, not looking at me. 'But aren't there people who do things like that?' I asked. 'You mean, excellent women, whom one respects and esteems.'"

"Was any man worth this burden? Probably not, but one shouldered it bravely and cheerfully, and in the end it might not turn out to be not so heavy after all."

I first read Pym in graduate school, on the recommendation of a fellow student, though I cannot now recall which titles I read. I had grown up in a church whose social structures were very like the ones depicted here, and I had neither enough life experience nor a wide enough exposure to literature to appreciate what Pym was doing. I believe I completely missed her point. This encounter with Pym was completely different.

This is a very funny book. There is a lot of pain hidden in the humor, but also a valiant if quiet struggle against the constraints imposed on single women. I particularly liked the different ways Pym used the phrase "excellent women" throughout the novel to variously indicate the unquestioning assumption of men that women exist to serve their needs, and the narrator's responses to that assumption--which in my reading range from acquiescence to subversive irony. Mildred (the narrator), has a circumscribed life, but she has found a number of small ways to use her position as an "excellent woman" to assert her own value and have after all something like what the woman in the novel who is least "excellent" called a "full life", even as the men and women around her continue to impose on her unfairly.

The audiobook is read by Jane Entwhistle. I found this slightly distracting, because she read the Flavia de Luce novels by Alan Bradley, and so her voice will always be for me that of the 12-year-old Flavia. ...more "

progress:

(59%)
"Birds, worms, and Jesuits. It might almost have been a poem, but I could not remember that anybody had ever written it." — Jan 22, 2026 06:08AM

Mar 18, 2024 08:09PM · see review