Excellent Women (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

"Beneath the gentle surfaces of [Pym's] novels is a slow-building comedy, salt wit in a saline drip. . . . Her work offers the reassurance that we are all as bad and as good, as prickly and as resilient, as any Evensong attendee. It is a useful gratification in grating times." --The New York Times

"A startling reminder that solitude may be chosen and that a lively, full novel can be constructed entirely within the precincts of that regressive virtue, feminine patience." --John Updike, The New Yorker

"Reading Barbara Pym is . . . a wonderful experience, full of unduplicable perceptions, sensations, and soul-stirrings." --Newsweek

"[One of] the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years." --Lord David Cecil

A subtle comedy about life and its complications chronicles the experiences of spinster Mildred Lathbury, who tends to become involved in other people's affairs, set in England during the 1950s. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.