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. 

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952)

After reading her first novel quite some while ago, it is great to be back visiting Pym. From memory, the previous one was set in a village in the country, whereas this is set in London, so quite a change of milieu. Clearly, she is famed for her investigation of what could be described as the smallness or seeming incompleteness of women's lives mid-twentieth century, and this one is an example of that. Equally obviously, one of her great claims is in how she makes humour from that purportedly limited material, and there's no questioning that here! This one's space is placed amongst the attendees and surrounds of an urban London church in 1945. The main character, Mildred Lathbury, knows herself to be one of the 'excellent women' who formed the backbone of a church's community back then when the church was a great deal more alive. That world presided over by the vicar and including bazaars and fetes as fundraisers is very much her locale, but she is also aware of herself in it as seen from the outside, at least to some extent. She knows that she might appear disappointing to a more romantic, or deep-living individual, and her connection to that wider world comes from imagination, poetry and occasional spurs of contact with more travelled types. She accedes in seeing herself with some disenchantment, definitely, but is keenly realistic about what someone of her nature can stand, or manage. Pym allows us to see this in quite a lot of detail; my suspicion being that the depiction is one of herself, give or take a bit. This combination of faithfulness to the details of the somewhat strictured life, where she appears to celebrate its limitations and delight in the minority of its concerns, with quietly sly undercutting of their constraining smallness through tossed-off satiric swipes, is the adroit stuff of the Pym mixture. This one centres around a couple who move in on the floor below Mildred. Rockingham (Rocky) is a handsome and effusively charming officer, just back from the war in Italy, whom Mildred imagines as having charmed a swathe of lonely Wrens at his villa, and Helena is a semi-glamorous looking anthropologist who hasn't seen Rocky consistently for the duration, and has got on with her academic life as best she can, including very possibly some amorous adventures. Mildred is careful around them, as they seem so urbane and worldly. Through visits to Helena's learned society, meetings with various unmarried and possibly eligible males, frugal meals, both out and in, in the rationed restriction of these spare new days of freedom, a drama with the vicar and an entrapping widow, and gossip with her associates among the bevy of excellent women who keep the whole edifice moving, Mildred's preparedness to help, occasional social uncertainty and wry self-criticism are well-exercised. Also given a workout is dry reproval of not only the smallness of mind necessary for such a life, but also of the more expansive romantic silliness to which she is largely immune. Attitudes to the should and shouldn't of things are compassed with forgiving fascination and zest by Mildred as she is given more of an education in how others live. Though I couldn't possibly survive on a diet of this shade alone, I cannot but acknowledge its penetrating intelligence, and saving comedy.

Commonplace Book

'"And that's not the worst," she went on, rummaging in a small desk which stood open and seemed to be full of old newspapers. "Read this." She handed me a cutting headed OWL BITES WOMAN, from which I read that an owl had flown in through a cottage window one evening and bitten a woman on the chin. "And this," she went on, handing me another cutting which told how a swan had knocked a girl off her bicycle. "What do you think of that?"

"Oh, I suppose they were just accidents," I said.

"Accidents! Even Miss Jessop agrees that they are rather more than accidents, don't you, Miss Jessop?"

Miss Jessop made a quavering sound which might have been "Yes" or "No" but it was not allowed to develop into speech, for Mrs. Bone broke in by telling Everard that Miss Jessop wouldn't want any sherry.

"The Dominion of the Birds," she went on. "I very much fear it may come to that."'

from Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (Chapter Sixteen)