THE FOLIO SOCIETY

'I suppose I had taken to using a little more make-up, my hair was more carefully arranged, my clothes a little less drab. I was hardly honest enough to admit even to myself that meeting the Napiers had made this difference and I certainly did not admit it to Dora'

Penned with such sharpness of wit that she could have stepped straight from the pages of a Jane Austen novel, Mildred Lathbury is one of those 'excellent women' whose life, in this case on the 'wrong side of Victoria Station, so very much not Belgravia', is an endless round of jumble sales, charity work and worthy biographies. With her small secure income and unrequited affections for the parish curate, she seems destined for an uneventful life - that is until the arrival in the flat downstairs of the Napiers: Helena, a blunt-speaking, domestically inept anthropologist - 'You'd hate sharing a kitchen with me. I'm such a slut' - and Rockingham, charming but a frightful cad and just decommissioned from the navy. First Helena confides that she is secretly involved with a man named Bone, then a glamorous widow moves into the vicarage, and soon Mildred is getting tipsy at lunchtime and dressing in colours other than brown ...

Barbara Pym was chosen by both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil as one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century. Excellent Women shows why. A quirky comedy about the social embarrassments - 'surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite somebody eating spaghetti' - and romantic entanglements of a small circle of friends, it is 'not just a slice of mild mid-twentieth-century comedy. It is a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived' (A. N. Wilson).