Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym (1953)

 Great to return to Pym again. This one feels like a subtle progression from the previous one in one sense in particular - 'dangerous' characters are a little more foregrounded. Like her first novel (about which I remember little else) the centre of this one is a village in the country. And again like it, it involves people nearby to the church or in it, and their love affairs, tight lives and niggles with one another. But it's no I. Compton-Burnett hell-stoker; the milieu is rounded out instead with incisive wit of a more standard variety. The two titular characters are an older woman from a particular Oxford college who has since married a clergyman, and a younger one of the same college who was tutored by the older and is still on the marriage market. The older, Jane, has moved to the village with her husband as vicar. The younger, Prudence, is in London, working at a small office. Jane and Prudence have kept up their relationship, with Jane feeling almost responsible sometimes for providing Prudence with marriage options. Prudence, meanwhile, has had quite a few relationships, about some of which Jane knows nothing. We work through the process of acclimatization into the village's (and the church's) life and with its characters as it happens to Jane and her husband Nicholas. And we concurrently examine Prudence's life in the office and at her flat in London with similar attention to variances of character at work and her private aims, the main one of these an adoration of her boss which is unrequited. Shot through with humour, this is what can be seen as typical Pym territory, as it veers between gentility and pointedness, warmly familiar pokes and somewhat cooler stabs. The thing which differentiates this a little is, as aforementioned, a livelier attention to characters, two in particular, who don't quite play by the rules. Jane herself is an uncomfortable blurter on occasion, steaming in before she's really thought something through, ruffling feathers with awkward truths. And even more of this stripe is village woman Jessie Morrow - a small, mouse-like, tiny-voiced companion to dragon Miss Doggett, who is splendid and severe. Jessie is the proverbial dark horse, revealed as having steel under her featherbed exterior, as she firmly (and unexpectedly) decides to oust Prudence from the affections of a local lothario - another of Jane's plans for her younger protégé goes astray. These small harshnesses only work in the way they do, I think, because they are couched within such a reassuring frame, though it would be interesting to see what Pym could do with an entirely savage free-for-all.