The antidote to "Desperate Housewives!", 12 Jul 2007
Miss Mildred Lathbury, the central character, leads a simple, proper life of doing good. She lives alone in post-WWII London, her limited social life centers around church activities. Like the very name Mildred, she is from a world so long gone we need reminding it ever existed! The book portrays an accurate picture of what British social interaction and morals used to be.

Into this world of dullness enter new characters who threaten the stability and indeed stir up storms (in teacups!). Mildred is torn back and forth, but never manages to get blown away with it all; almost despite herself she remains at the calm center, dispensing tea and good advice to one and all!

It is all very harmless, the action is slight, the characters are so poked with humour that it is hard to take them seriously. The tension is from Mildred's desire for something new and exciting - the feeling that life is passing her by, but what is on offer is never convincing. Her too sensible nature will not blind itself to the realities, it refuses to ignore the cons. She is ever true to her nature, her nature being restraint!

Light but at the same time deep. True - I'm sure everyone can find something here to resonate with their life.

Excellent Women, 22 Mar 2007
I was recently reccommended Barbara Pym, by a friend who knew I had enjoyed similar books to hers. This is the first one that I have read. What a treat it was. They just don't write books like this anymore I'm sorry to say. Mildred is a sweet likeable character from another time - considered middle aged at just over thirty - and pitied for being unmarried. In it Barbara Pym seems to be raising the issue of how it is society measures a woman's usefulness - and suggests that "the excellent women" of the title are the ones that people so often depend upon, but never marry - a question which in itself dates the book I suppose - but at the time may have been true for some women at least. I will be reading more by this author soon.



A marvellous book., 20 Dec 2002
Spinsters, vicars, and anthropologists. It doesn't sound very promising material, but this is one of the best Pyms. While being quietly funny (for instance, the moment when the heroine, having tasted beer for the first time in a pub, is disappointed because it tastes like dishwater), it nevertheless conveys the pathos of the lives of ordinary people like the vicar's unmarried sister, terribly distressed at the spite of his fiancee.
Mildred, the heroine, tells her story in the first person. She is a pillar of the parish who is drawn into the more exciting and dramatic world of her neighbours in the flat below, and then into anthropological circles. This last gives rise to a great deal of humour, as BP makes anthropology sound so ridiculous, if worthy.
One of the great things about BP is the way major charcters in one novel appear as minor characters in another; so, for instance, Allegra Grey is going to move to the parish of, so to speak, "A Glass of Blessings."

An excellent reading of Pym's novel, 07 Oct 2000
This is one of Barbara Pym's finest novels, and one of her funniest. Mildred Lathbury, a spinster in her 30's is living in a flat in London after the Second World War. She works part time helping distressed gentlewomen, and is one of the "excellent women" who are involved in her local church. When new neighbours arrive, she is taken into a different world, where anthropologists discuss kinship diagrams, and charming Naval husbands take her out for a drink in the afternoon. At the same time, she is dealing with her friend Winifred, whose brother the vicar is taking too much of an interest in their new lodger,an attractive widow. Juliet Stevenson's reading of the novel is wonderful. She differentiates Mildred's irony from Winifred's almost puppy-like enthusiasm, and Helena Napier's sophistication from Everard Bone's pose of world-weariness with ease. An excellent recording.

The antidote to "Desperate Housewives!", 12 Jul 2007
Miss Mildred Lathbury, the central character, leads a simple, proper life of doing good. She lives alone in post-WWII London, her limited social life centers around church activities. Like the very name Mildred, she is from a world so long gone we need reminding it ever existed! The book portrays an accurate picture of what British social interaction and morals used to be.

Into this world of dullness enter new characters who threaten the stability and indeed stir up storms (in teacups!). Mildred is torn back and forth, but never manages to get blown away with it all; almost despite herself she remains at the calm center, dispensing tea and good advice to one and all!

It is all very harmless, the action is slight, the characters are so poked with humour that it is hard to take them seriously. The tension is from Mildred's desire for something new and exciting - the feeling that life is passing her by, but what is on offer is never convincing. Her too sensible nature will not blind itself to the realities, it refuses to ignore the cons. She is ever true to her nature, her nature being restraint!

Light but at the same time deep. True - I'm sure everyone can find something here to resonate with their life.

Excellent Women, 22 Mar 2007
I was recently reccommended Barbara Pym, by a friend who knew I had enjoyed similar books to hers. This is the first one that I have read. What a treat it was. They just don't write books like this anymore I'm sorry to say. Mildred is a sweet likeable character from another time - considered middle aged at just over thirty - and pitied for being unmarried. In it Barbara Pym seems to be raising the issue of how it is society measures a woman's usefulness - and suggests that "the excellent women" of the title are the ones that people so often depend upon, but never marry - a question which in itself dates the book I suppose - but at the time may have been true for some women at least. I will be reading more by this author soon.



A marvellous book., 20 Dec 2002
Spinsters, vicars, and anthropologists. It doesn't sound very promising material, but this is one of the best Pyms. While being quietly funny (for instance, the moment when the heroine, having tasted beer for the first time in a pub, is disappointed because it tastes like dishwater), it nevertheless conveys the pathos of the lives of ordinary people like the vicar's unmarried sister, terribly distressed at the spite of his fiancee.
Mildred, the heroine, tells her story in the first person. She is a pillar of the parish who is drawn into the more exciting and dramatic world of her neighbours in the flat below, and then into anthropological circles. This last gives rise to a great deal of humour, as BP makes anthropology sound so ridiculous, if worthy.
One of the great things about BP is the way major charcters in one novel appear as minor characters in another; so, for instance, Allegra Grey is going to move to the parish of, so to speak, "A Glass of Blessings."

An excellent reading of Pym's novel, 07 Oct 2000
This is one of Barbara Pym's finest novels, and one of her funniest. Mildred Lathbury, a spinster in her 30's is living in a flat in London after the Second World War. She works part time helping distressed gentlewomen, and is one of the "excellent women" who are involved in her local church. When new neighbours arrive, she is taken into a different world, where anthropologists discuss kinship diagrams, and charming Naval husbands take her out for a drink in the afternoon. At the same time, she is dealing with her friend Winifred, whose brother the vicar is taking too much of an interest in their new lodger,an attractive widow. Juliet Stevenson's reading of the novel is wonderful. She differentiates Mildred's irony from Winifred's almost puppy-like enthusiasm, and Helena Napier's sophistication from Everard Bone's pose of world-weariness with ease. An excellent recording.

A glass of praise, 26 Sep 2008
A Glass of Blessings (along with Excellent Women) is one of my favourite Pym novels and certainly the funniest. I'm not sure why she is compared to Jane Austen (she owes no more to her than do a lot of other writers both male and female) or why the cover blurb says she makes readers smile. Most readers will be reduced to laughing out loud - this novel of 1950s mores seems hardly to have dated at all, despite taking as its subject the leisured life of a stay-at-home wife and the amorous adventures of various clergymen.

Rather, she is a kind of ecclesiastical version of Nancy Mitford as the various inhabitants of a London parish and the more worldly-world of the disolute Piers and Keith come under the superior eye of Wilmet. I particularly liked the verger's (I think) joy at discovering dry rot in the church ("It will make a man of him") and Mr. Bason's career as a chef-cum-antiques shop manager in Devon. Highly recommended

Will Wilmet Meet Herself?, 23 Jun 2004
Narrated by the shallow Wilmet, Glass of Blessings showcases Pym's wonderfully observant characterizations and contradictory impulses. Wilmet herself observes and comments but the reader soon learns that this self-absorbed woman is a narrator flawfully unself-aware. Pym includes deliciously witty commentary on class, church, and love through Wilmet's first person narration. No plot to speak of, naturally, but the question of Wilmet's realizing some understanding of love, of herself moves the reader through this sly wonderful novel, full of the blessings of Pym's irony.

Quiet drama, 18 Oct 2002
We are in 1950s London with an excellent cast of characters. The pathalogically domesticated Keith, forever washing down paintwork and boiling discloths in Tide; Father Thames, the gourmet priest with a penchant for Lapsang Souchong which can never be satisfied at parish get-togethers; and the kleptomaniac Wilf Bason, housekeeper at the clergy house, whose idea of a suitable meal for Lent is fried octopus; these are among the best.
Wilmet, the heroine, self-absorbed but aware to some extent of her failings, skims the surface of life without engaging with it. She is shocked out of her complacency by a series of events relating mainly to the novel's gay couple, Keith and Piers. When it was published, homosexuality was against the law, so it was a subversive element. However, it is handled with matter-of-factness, and there is very little Angst, except that Piers drinks more than is good for him, which could happen to any one.
Wilmet avoids being totally unsympathetic by the tone of her interior monologues, which have a lot in common with those of Miss Pym's spinster heroines - these include the references to Victorian literature and the interest in the details of other peoples' lives (as long as they are "people like us").
A top class Pym.

Wilmet's blessings, 07 Oct 2000
Wilmet Forsyrh is an attractive woman in her 30's with not enough to do. She lives with her husband, Rodney, in her mother-in-law Sybil's house in London, and fills up her days with lunchtime church services and idle speculations about her friends. Wilmet's assumptions about her husband, her friends and her own life are usually mistaken, yet we want to believe in them just as much as Wilmet does. At the end of the novel, Wilmet has to come to terms with her mistakes, and she realises how lucky she really is. Some of Pym's best character names are in this novel- Piers Longridge, Wilfred Basin and Marius Ransome (the curate) among them. Susan Jameson's reading of the novel is excellent. She gives Wilmet a touch of wistfulness which is just right, and she has fun with the kleptomaniac Mr Basin. A great recording.

The antidote to "Desperate Housewives!", 12 Jul 2007
Miss Mildred Lathbury, the central character, leads a simple, proper life of doing good. She lives alone in post-WWII London, her limited social life centers around church activities. Like the very name Mildred, she is from a world so long gone we need reminding it ever existed! The book portrays an accurate picture of what British social interaction and morals used to be.

Into this world of dullness enter new characters who threaten the stability and indeed stir up storms (in teacups!). Mildred is torn back and forth, but never manages to get blown away with it all; almost despite herself she remains at the calm center, dispensing tea and good advice to one and all!

It is all very harmless, the action is slight, the characters are so poked with humour that it is hard to take them seriously. The tension is from Mildred's desire for something new and exciting - the feeling that life is passing her by, but what is on offer is never convincing. Her too sensible nature will not blind itself to the realities, it refuses to ignore the cons. She is ever true to her nature, her nature being restraint!

Light but at the same time deep. True - I'm sure everyone can find something here to resonate with their life.

Excellent Women, 22 Mar 2007
I was recently reccommended Barbara Pym, by a friend who knew I had enjoyed similar books to hers. This is the first one that I have read. What a treat it was. They just don't write books like this anymore I'm sorry to say. Mildred is a sweet likeable character from another time - considered middle aged at just over thirty - and pitied for being unmarried. In it Barbara Pym seems to be raising the issue of how it is society measures a woman's usefulness - and suggests that "the excellent women" of the title are the ones that people so often depend upon, but never marry - a question which in itself dates the book I suppose - but at the time may have been true for some women at least. I will be reading more by this author soon.



A marvellous book., 20 Dec 2002
Spinsters, vicars, and anthropologists. It doesn't sound very promising material, but this is one of the best Pyms. While being quietly funny (for instance, the moment when the heroine, having tasted beer for the first time in a pub, is disappointed because it tastes like dishwater), it nevertheless conveys the pathos of the lives of ordinary people like the vicar's unmarried sister, terribly distressed at the spite of his fiancee.
Mildred, the heroine, tells her story in the first person. She is a pillar of the parish who is drawn into the more exciting and dramatic world of her neighbours in the flat below, and then into anthropological circles. This last gives rise to a great deal of humour, as BP makes anthropology sound so ridiculous, if worthy.
One of the great things about BP is the way major charcters in one novel appear as minor characters in another; so, for instance, Allegra Grey is going to move to the parish of, so to speak, "A Glass of Blessings."

An excellent reading of Pym's novel, 07 Oct 2000
This is one of Barbara Pym's finest novels, and one of her funniest. Mildred Lathbury, a spinster in her 30's is living in a flat in London after the Second World War. She works part time helping distressed gentlewomen, and is one of the "excellent women" who are involved in her local church. When new neighbours arrive, she is taken into a different world, where anthropologists discuss kinship diagrams, and charming Naval husbands take her out for a drink in the afternoon. At the same time, she is dealing with her friend Winifred, whose brother the vicar is taking too much of an interest in their new lodger,an attractive widow. Juliet Stevenson's reading of the novel is wonderful. She differentiates Mildred's irony from Winifred's almost puppy-like enthusiasm, and Helena Napier's sophistication from Everard Bone's pose of world-weariness with ease. An excellent recording.

A glass of praise, 26 Sep 2008
A Glass of Blessings (along with Excellent Women) is one of my favourite Pym novels and certainly the funniest. I'm not sure why she is compared to Jane Austen (she owes no more to her than do a lot of other writers both male and female) or why the cover blurb says she makes readers smile. Most readers will be reduced to laughing out loud - this novel of 1950s mores seems hardly to have dated at all, despite taking as its subject the leisured life of a stay-at-home wife and the amorous adventures of various clergymen.

Rather, she is a kind of ecclesiastical version of Nancy Mitford as the various inhabitants of a London parish and the more worldly-world of the disolute Piers and Keith come under the superior eye of Wilmet. I particularly liked the verger's (I think) joy at discovering dry rot in the church ("It will make a man of him") and Mr. Bason's career as a chef-cum-antiques shop manager in Devon. Highly recommended

Will Wilmet Meet Herself?, 23 Jun 2004
Narrated by the shallow Wilmet, Glass of Blessings showcases Pym's wonderfully observant characterizations and contradictory impulses. Wilmet herself observes and comments but the reader soon learns that this self-absorbed woman is a narrator flawfully unself-aware. Pym includes deliciously witty commentary on class, church, and love through Wilmet's first person narration. No plot to speak of, naturally, but the question of Wilmet's realizing some understanding of love, of herself moves the reader through this sly wonderful novel, full of the blessings of Pym's irony.

Quiet drama, 18 Oct 2002
We are in 1950s London with an excellent cast of characters. The pathalogically domesticated Keith, forever washing down paintwork and boiling discloths in Tide; Father Thames, the gourmet priest with a penchant for Lapsang Souchong which can never be satisfied at parish get-togethers; and the kleptomaniac Wilf Bason, housekeeper at the clergy house, whose idea of a suitable meal for Lent is fried octopus; these are among the best.
Wilmet, the heroine, self-absorbed but aware to some extent of her failings, skims the surface of life without engaging with it. She is shocked out of her complacency by a series of events relating mainly to the novel's gay couple, Keith and Piers. When it was published, homosexuality was against the law, so it was a subversive element. However, it is handled with matter-of-factness, and there is very little Angst, except that Piers drinks more than is good for him, which could happen to any one.
Wilmet avoids being totally unsympathetic by the tone of her interior monologues, which have a lot in common with those of Miss Pym's spinster heroines - these include the references to Victorian literature and the interest in the details of other peoples' lives (as long as they are "people like us").
A top class Pym.

Wilmet's blessings, 07 Oct 2000
Wilmet Forsyrh is an attractive woman in her 30's with not enough to do. She lives with her husband, Rodney, in her mother-in-law Sybil's house in London, and fills up her days with lunchtime church services and idle speculations about her friends. Wilmet's assumptions about her husband, her friends and her own life are usually mistaken, yet we want to believe in them just as much as Wilmet does. At the end of the novel, Wilmet has to come to terms with her mistakes, and she realises how lucky she really is. Some of Pym's best character names are in this novel- Piers Longridge, Wilfred Basin and Marius Ransome (the curate) among them. Susan Jameson's reading of the novel is excellent. She gives Wilmet a touch of wistfulness which is just right, and she has fun with the kleptomaniac Mr Basin. A great recording.

Not Pym's best, 25 Sep 2008
I enjoy Barbara Pym's novels generally but she is definitely off form with this outing. Perhaps it is because she is describing the lives and (disappointing) loves of two female friends who were at Oxford University together, that there seems to be a lack of drama to move events along. Or rather, there is not the clash of characters or unexpected event which drives most novels.

The introduction by Jilly Cooper doesn't improve things much. Comparing Pym to Jane Austen is neither original or particularly revealing and you end up feeling you have discovered more about Cooper's life than the background to the novel. All in all this really isn't in the same class as Excellent Women or A Glass of Blessings, my two favourite Barbara Pym tomes.

Not worthy of the many reprints, 01 Sep 2008
Light and frothy, with very unbelievable characters. If you enjoy dated tales about 2 dimensional characters - this is for you! If not, try anything by Khalid Hosseini!

social satire and the fifities, 31 May 2008
A novel that gives the authentic flavour of the middle class gentility in the 1950s. If this sounds dull, it really isn't.

Her anthropological view of the society she is examining is so wry, pitiless but so humorous (She worked at the International African Institute in London for some years, and played a large part in the editing of its scholarly journal, Africa, hence the frequency with which anthropology/anthropologists crop up in her novels, and maybe foregrounds her social criticism.) The hopeless vagaries of men of the cloth as well as academics come under her scornful microsopic scrutiny. Her single women, devout and well-meaning, live lives of virtuous 'quiet desperation'.

Her writing is succinct and clear, hardly a word wasted. She has often been compared to Jane Austen, but she also shares the sharp eye of Waugh in a novel like "A Handful of Dust'.

A World that is gone forever, 20 May 2007
This is a wonderful book, a very English setting, and some very English characters who inhabit a world that is gone forever. Prudence is a character many of us can sympathise with, her past littered with disappointments. Her interfering friend Jane - who is much older, married with an almost grown up daughter, is keen to help her become settled. Jane despite her being a middle aged clergy wife is still wonderfully romantic, and it demonstrates superbly, how, no matter how we age, and take on various responsibilities, we still have the same concerns as in our youth. This is the second Barbara Pym novel I have read - and I am now keen to read them all

The antidote to "Desperate Housewives!", 12 Jul 2007
Miss Mildred Lathbury, the central character, leads a simple, proper life of doing good. She lives alone in post-WWII London, her limited social life centers around church activities. Like the very name Mildred, she is from a world so long gone we need reminding it ever existed! The book portrays an accurate picture of what British social interaction and morals used to be.

Into this world of dullness enter new characters who threaten the stability and indeed stir up storms (in teacups!). Mildred is torn back and forth, but never manages to get blown away with it all; almost despite herself she remains at the calm center, dispensing tea and good advice to one and all!

It is all very harmless, the action is slight, the characters are so poked with humour that it is hard to take them seriously. The tension is from Mildred's desire for something new and exciting - the feeling that life is passing her by, but what is on offer is never convincing. Her too sensible nature will not blind itself to the realities, it refuses to ignore the cons. She is ever true to her nature, her nature being restraint!

Light but at the same time deep. True - I'm sure everyone can find something here to resonate with their life.

Excellent Women, 22 Mar 2007
I was recently reccommended Barbara Pym, by a friend who knew I had enjoyed similar books to hers. This is the first one that I have read. What a treat it was. They just don't write books like this anymore I'm sorry to say. Mildred is a sweet likeable character from another time - considered middle aged at just over thirty - and pitied for being unmarried. In it Barbara Pym seems to be raising the issue of how it is society measures a woman's usefulness - and suggests that "the excellent women" of the title are the ones that people so often depend upon, but never marry - a question which in itself dates the book I suppose - but at the time may have been true for some women at least. I will be reading more by this author soon.



A marvellous book., 20 Dec 2002
Spinsters, vicars, and anthropologists. It doesn't sound very promising material, but this is one of the best Pyms. While being quietly funny (for instance, the moment when the heroine, having tasted beer for the first time in a pub, is disappointed because it tastes like dishwater), it nevertheless conveys the pathos of the lives of ordinary people like the vicar's unmarried sister, terribly distressed at the spite of his fiancee.
Mildred, the heroine, tells her story in the first person. She is a pillar of the parish who is drawn into the more exciting and dramatic world of her neighbours in the flat below, and then into anthropological circles. This last gives rise to a great deal of humour, as BP makes anthropology sound so ridiculous, if worthy.
One of the great things about BP is the way major charcters in one novel appear as minor characters in another; so, for instance, Allegra Grey is going to move to the parish of, so to speak, "A Glass of Blessings."

An excellent reading of Pym's novel, 07 Oct 2000
This is one of Barbara Pym's finest novels, and one of her funniest. Mildred Lathbury, a spinster in her 30's is living in a flat in London after the Second World War. She works part time helping distressed gentlewomen, and is one of the "excellent women" who are involved in her local church. When new neighbours arrive, she is taken into a different world, where anthropologists discuss kinship diagrams, and charming Naval husbands take her out for a drink in the afternoon. At the same time, she is dealing with her friend Winifred, whose brother the vicar is taking too much of an interest in their new lodger,an attractive widow. Juliet Stevenson's reading of the novel is wonderful. She differentiates Mildred's irony from Winifred's almost puppy-like enthusiasm, and Helena Napier's sophistication from Everard Bone's pose of world-weariness with ease. An excellent recording.

A glass of praise, 26 Sep 2008
A Glass of Blessings (along with Excellent Women) is one of my favourite Pym novels and certainly the funniest. I'm not sure why she is compared to Jane Austen (she owes no more to her than do a lot of other writers both male and female) or why the cover blurb says she makes readers smile. Most readers will be reduced to laughing out loud - this novel of 1950s mores seems hardly to have dated at all, despite taking as its subject the leisured life of a stay-at-home wife and the amorous adventures of various clergymen.

Rather, she is a kind of ecclesiastical version of Nancy Mitford as the various inhabitants of a London parish and the more worldly-world of the disolute Piers and Keith come under the superior eye of Wilmet. I particularly liked the verger's (I think) joy at discovering dry rot in the church ("It will make a man of him") and Mr. Bason's career as a chef-cum-antiques shop manager in Devon. Highly recommended

Will Wilmet Meet Herself?, 23 Jun 2004
Narrated by the shallow Wilmet, Glass of Blessings showcases Pym's wonderfully observant characterizations and contradictory impulses. Wilmet herself observes and comments but the reader soon learns that this self-absorbed woman is a narrator flawfully unself-aware. Pym includes deliciously witty commentary on class, church, and love through Wilmet's first person narration. No plot to speak of, naturally, but the question of Wilmet's realizing some understanding of love, of herself moves the reader through this sly wonderful novel, full of the blessings of Pym's irony.

Quiet drama, 18 Oct 2002
We are in 1950s London with an excellent cast of characters. The pathalogically domesticated Keith, forever washing down paintwork and boiling discloths in Tide; Father Thames, the gourmet priest with a penchant for Lapsang Souchong which can never be satisfied at parish get-togethers; and the kleptomaniac Wilf Bason, housekeeper at the clergy house, whose idea of a suitable meal for Lent is fried octopus; these are among the best.
Wilmet, the heroine, self-absorbed but aware to some extent of her failings, skims the surface of life without engaging with it. She is shocked out of her complacency by a series of events relating mainly to the novel's gay couple, Keith and Piers. When it was published, homosexuality was against the law, so it was a subversive element. However, it is handled with matter-of-factness, and there is very little Angst, except that Piers drinks more than is good for him, which could happen to any one.
Wilmet avoids being totally unsympathetic by the tone of her interior monologues, which have a lot in common with those of Miss Pym's spinster heroines - these include the references to Victorian literature and the interest in the details of other peoples' lives (as long as they are "people like us").
A top class Pym.

Wilmet's blessings, 07 Oct 2000
Wilmet Forsyrh is an attractive woman in her 30's with not enough to do. She lives with her husband, Rodney, in her mother-in-law Sybil's house in London, and fills up her days with lunchtime church services and idle speculations about her friends. Wilmet's assumptions about her husband, her friends and her own life are usually mistaken, yet we want to believe in them just as much as Wilmet does. At the end of the novel, Wilmet has to come to terms with her mistakes, and she realises how lucky she really is. Some of Pym's best character names are in this novel- Piers Longridge, Wilfred Basin and Marius Ransome (the curate) among them. Susan Jameson's reading of the novel is excellent. She gives Wilmet a touch of wistfulness which is just right, and she has fun with the kleptomaniac Mr Basin. A great recording.

Not Pym's best, 25 Sep 2008
I enjoy Barbara Pym's novels generally but she is definitely off form with this outing. Perhaps it is because she is describing the lives and (disappointing) loves of two female friends who were at Oxford University together, that there seems to be a lack of drama to move events along. Or rather, there is not the clash of characters or unexpected event which drives most novels.

The introduction by Jilly Cooper doesn't improve things much. Comparing Pym to Jane Austen is neither original or particularly revealing and you end up feeling you have discovered more about Cooper's life than the background to the novel. All in all this really isn't in the same class as Excellent Women or A Glass of Blessings, my two favourite Barbara Pym tomes.

Not worthy of the many reprints, 01 Sep 2008
Light and frothy, with very unbelievable characters. If you enjoy dated tales about 2 dimensional characters - this is for you! If not, try anything by Khalid Hosseini!

social satire and the fifities, 31 May 2008
A novel that gives the authentic flavour of the middle class gentility in the 1950s. If this sounds dull, it really isn't.

Her anthropological view of the society she is examining is so wry, pitiless but so humorous (She worked at the International African Institute in London for some years, and played a large part in the editing of its scholarly journal, Africa, hence the frequency with which anthropology/anthropologists crop up in her novels, and maybe foregrounds her social criticism.) The hopeless vagaries of men of the cloth as well as academics come under her scornful microsopic scrutiny. Her single women, devout and well-meaning, live lives of virtuous 'quiet desperation'.

Her writing is succinct and clear, hardly a word wasted. She has often been compared to Jane Austen, but she also shares the sharp eye of Waugh in a novel like "A Handful of Dust'.

A World that is gone forever, 20 May 2007
This is a wonderful book, a very English setting, and some very English characters who inhabit a world that is gone forever. Prudence is a character many of us can sympathise with, her past littered with disappointments. Her interfering friend Jane - who is much older, married with an almost grown up daughter, is keen to help her become settled. Jane despite her being a middle aged clergy wife is still wonderfully romantic, and it demonstrates superbly, how, no matter how we age, and take on various responsibilities, we still have the same concerns as in our youth. This is the second Barbara Pym novel I have read - and I am now keen to read them all

A beautiful past, 28 Aug 2008
Some Tame Gazelle is set in a village just as picturesque as St Mary Mead or any other literary village, but the characters are deeper and utterly credible. It is full of moments of recognition, such as Belinda's joy at making pasta, 'finer than the finest chamois leather' and who has not had sudden guests and felt guilty at the withered orange in the bowl? It gently and tellingly relays what has been described as the beauty of the unregarded life, and points out that romance is on offer, even there. It repays rereading, for the more subtle humour can be sometimes missed on a first read. It is a brilliant book, and its layers reveal themselves slowly as one becomes more and more drawn into the lives of the Bede sisters.

Touching and funny, 22 Apr 2001
In the early chapters of "Some Tame Gazelle" we are taken on a "Pym moments" romp through the day-to-day lives of the spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede. Timid, sentimental Belinda (another of Pym's "Excellent Women"), elder of the two, a faithful church worker, has loved the peevish, married Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve ("dear Henry") for over 30 years. Belinda quotes 18th Century poets, wears "sensible" shoes and longs for "some sympathetic person to whom she could say that Dr. Johnson had been so right when he had said that all change is of itself an evil." Plump ("attractive in a fat Teutonic way"), jolly and style-conscious Harriet, in her middle fifties, has a fondness for young curates to whom she serves boiled chicken suppers and makes presents of hand-knitted socks and home-made jellies. We meet: The Reverend Edgar Donne, the latest in a long line of young curates fussed over by Harriet; Edith Liversidge ("a kind of decayed gentlewoman"), the disheveled, blunt-speaking neighbor with an interest in sanitation arrangements; the dreary, snobbish Connie Aspinall, who basks in the memory of her glory days when she was companion to Lady Grudge of Belgrave Square ("a kind of relation of one of Queen Alexandra's Ladies-in-Waiting"); Miss Prior, the touchy sewing woman, in a tender and humorous episode involving cauliflower cheese; the melancholy Count Ricardo Bianco, who on a regular basis offers proposals of marriage to Harriet. There is Archdeacon Hoccleve, the object of Belinda's devotion ("her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning"), whose standoffish behavior and proclivity for choosing unsuitable prayers and for preaching obscure literary sermons no one understands win him little favor among the people in his parish. And there are more matchless Pym characters set against a quintessential Pym story, touching and funny and quite wonderful.

The antidote to "Desperate Housewives!", 12 Jul 2007
Miss Mildred Lathbury, the central character, leads a simple, proper life of doing good. She lives alone in post-WWII London, her limited social life centers around church activities. Like the very name Mildred, she is from a world so long gone we need reminding it ever existed! The book portrays an accurate picture of what British social interaction and morals used to be.

Into this world of dullness enter new characters who threaten the stability and indeed stir up storms (in teacups!). Mildred is torn back and forth, but never manages to get blown away with it all; almost despite herself she remains at the calm center, dispensing tea and good advice to one and all!

It is all very harmless, the action is slight, the characters are so poked with humour that it is hard to take them seriously. The tension is from Mildred's desire for something new and exciting - the feeling that life is passing her by, but what is on offer is never convincing. Her too sensible nature will not blind itself to the realities, it refuses to ignore the cons. She is ever true to her nature, her nature being restraint!

Light but at the same time deep. True - I'm sure everyone can find something here to resonate with their life.

Excellent Women, 22 Mar 2007
I was recently reccommended Barbara Pym, by a friend who knew I had enjoyed similar books to hers. This is the first one that I have read. What a treat it was. They just don't write books like this anymore I'm sorry to say. Mildred is a sweet likeable character from another time - considered middle aged at just over thirty - and pitied for being unmarried. In it Barbara Pym seems to be raising the issue of how it is society measures a woman's usefulness - and suggests that "the excellent women" of the title are the ones that people so often depend upon, but never marry - a question which in itself dates the book I suppose - but at the time may have been true for some women at least. I will be reading more by this author soon.



A marvellous book., 20 Dec 2002
Spinsters, vicars, and anthropologists. It doesn't sound very promising material, but this is one of the best Pyms. While being quietly funny (for instance, the moment when the heroine, having tasted beer for the first time in a pub, is disappointed because it tastes like dishwater), it nevertheless conveys the pathos of the lives of ordinary people like the vicar's unmarried sister, terribly distressed at the spite of his fiancee.
Mildred, the heroine, tells her story in the first person. She is a pillar of the parish who is drawn into the more exciting and dramatic world of her neighbours in the flat below, and then into anthropological circles. This last gives rise to a great deal of humour, as BP makes anthropology sound so ridiculous, if worthy.
One of the great things about BP is the way major charcters in one novel appear as minor characters in another; so, for instance, Allegra Grey is going to move to the parish of, so to speak, "A Glass of Blessings."

An excellent reading of Pym's novel, 07 Oct 2000
This is one of Barbara Pym's finest novels, and one of her funniest. Mildred Lathbury, a spinster in her 30's is living in a flat in London after the Second World War. She works part time helping distressed gentlewomen, and is one of the "excellent women" who are involved in her local church. When new neighbours arrive, she is taken into a different world, where anthropologists discuss kinship diagrams, and charming Naval husbands take her out for a drink in the afternoon. At the same time, she is dealing with her friend Winifred, whose brother the vicar is taking too much of an interest in their new lodger,an attractive widow. Juliet Stevenson's reading of the novel is wonderful. She differentiates Mildred's irony from Winifred's almost puppy-like enthusiasm, and Helena Napier's sophistication from Everard Bone's pose of world-weariness with ease. An excellent recording.

A glass of praise, 26 Sep 2008
A Glass of Blessings (along with Excellent Women) is one of my favourite Pym novels and certainly the funniest. I'm not sure why she is compared to Jane Austen (she owes no more to her than do a lot of other writers both male and female) or why the cover blurb says she makes readers smile. Most readers will be reduced to laughing out loud - this novel of 1950s mores seems hardly to have dated at all, despite taking as its subject the leisured life of a stay-at-home wife and the amorous adventures of various clergymen.

Rather, she is a kind of ecclesiastical version of Nancy Mitford as the various inhabitants of a London parish and the more worldly-world of the disolute Piers and Keith come under the superior eye of Wilmet. I particularly liked the verger's (I think) joy at discovering dry rot in the church ("It will make a man of him") and Mr. Bason's career as a chef-cum-antiques shop manager in Devon. Highly recommended

Will Wilmet Meet Herself?, 23 Jun 2004
Narrated by the shallow Wilmet, Glass of Blessings showcases Pym's wonderfully observant characterizations and contradictory impulses. Wilmet herself observes and comments but the reader soon learns that this self-absorbed woman is a narrator flawfully unself-aware. Pym includes deliciously witty commentary on class, church, and love through Wilmet's first person narration. No plot to speak of, naturally, but the question of Wilmet's realizing some understanding of love, of herself moves the reader through this sly wonderful novel, full of the blessings of Pym's irony.

Quiet drama, 18 Oct 2002
We are in 1950s London with an excellent cast of characters. The pathalogically domesticated Keith, forever washing down paintwork and boiling discloths in Tide; Father Thames, the gourmet priest with a penchant for Lapsang Souchong which can never be satisfied at parish get-togethers; and the kleptomaniac Wilf Bason, housekeeper at the clergy house, whose idea of a suitable meal for Lent is fried octopus; these are among the best.
Wilmet, the heroine, self-absorbed but aware to some extent of her failings, skims the surface of life without engaging with it. She is shocked out of her complacency by a series of events relating mainly to the novel's gay couple, Keith and Piers. When it was published, homosexuality was against the law, so it was a subversive element. However, it is handled with matter-of-factness, and there is very little Angst, except that Piers drinks more than is good for him, which could happen to any one.
Wilmet avoids being totally unsympathetic by the tone of her interior monologues, which have a lot in common with those of Miss Pym's spinster heroines - these include the references to Victorian literature and the interest in the details of other peoples' lives (as long as they are "people like us").
A top class Pym.

Wilmet's blessings, 07 Oct 2000
Wilmet Forsyrh is an attractive woman in her 30's with not enough to do. She lives with her husband, Rodney, in her mother-in-law Sybil's house in London, and fills up her days with lunchtime church services and idle speculations about her friends. Wilmet's assumptions about her husband, her friends and her own life are usually mistaken, yet we want to believe in them just as much as Wilmet does. At the end of the novel, Wilmet has to come to terms with her mistakes, and she realises how lucky she really is. Some of Pym's best character names are in this novel- Piers Longridge, Wilfred Basin and Marius Ransome (the curate) among them. Susan Jameson's reading of the novel is excellent. She gives Wilmet a touch of wistfulness which is just right, and she has fun with the kleptomaniac Mr Basin. A great recording.

Not Pym's best, 25 Sep 2008
I enjoy Barbara Pym's novels generally but she is definitely off form with this outing. Perhaps it is because she is describing the lives and (disappointing) loves of two female friends who were at Oxford University together, that there seems to be a lack of drama to move events along. Or rather, there is not the clash of characters or unexpected event which drives most novels.

The introduction by Jilly Cooper doesn't improve things much. Comparing Pym to Jane Austen is neither original or particularly revealing and you end up feeling you have discovered more about Cooper's life than the background to the novel. All in all this really isn't in the same class as Excellent Women or A Glass of Blessings, my two favourite Barbara Pym tomes.

Not worthy of the many reprints, 01 Sep 2008
Light and frothy, with very unbelievable characters. If you enjoy dated tales about 2 dimensional characters - this is for you! If not, try anything by Khalid Hosseini!

social satire and the fifities, 31 May 2008
A novel that gives the authentic flavour of the middle class gentility in the 1950s. If this sounds dull, it really isn't.

Her anthropological view of the society she is examining is so wry, pitiless but so humorous (She worked at the International African Institute in London for some years, and played a large part in the editing of its scholarly journal, Africa, hence the frequency with which anthropology/anthropologists crop up in her novels, and maybe foregrounds her social criticism.) The hopeless vagaries of men of the cloth as well as academics come under her scornful microsopic scrutiny. Her single women, devout and well-meaning, live lives of virtuous 'quiet desperation'.

Her writing is succinct and clear, hardly a word wasted. She has often been compared to Jane Austen, but she also shares the sharp eye of Waugh in a novel like "A Handful of Dust'.

A World that is gone forever, 20 May 2007
This is a wonderful book, a very English setting, and some very English characters who inhabit a world that is gone forever. Prudence is a character many of us can sympathise with, her past littered with disappointments. Her interfering friend Jane - who is much older, married with an almost grown up daughter, is keen to help her become settled. Jane despite her being a middle aged clergy wife is still wonderfully romantic, and it demonstrates superbly, how, no matter how we age, and take on various responsibilities, we still have the same concerns as in our youth. This is the second Barbara Pym novel I have read - and I am now keen to read them all

A beautiful past, 28 Aug 2008
Some Tame Gazelle is set in a village just as picturesque as St Mary Mead or any other literary village, but the characters are deeper and utterly credible. It is full of moments of recognition, such as Belinda's joy at making pasta, 'finer than the finest chamois leather' and who has not had sudden guests and felt guilty at the withered orange in the bowl? It gently and tellingly relays what has been described as the beauty of the unregarded life, and points out that romance is on offer, even there. It repays rereading, for the more subtle humour can be sometimes missed on a first read. It is a brilliant book, and its layers reveal themselves slowly as one becomes more and more drawn into the lives of the Bede sisters.

Touching and funny, 22 Apr 2001
In the early chapters of "Some Tame Gazelle" we are taken on a "Pym moments" romp through the day-to-day lives of the spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede. Timid, sentimental Belinda (another of Pym's "Excellent Women"), elder of the two, a faithful church worker, has loved the peevish, married Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve ("dear Henry") for over 30 years. Belinda quotes 18th Century poets, wears "sensible" shoes and longs for "some sympathetic person to whom she could say that Dr. Johnson had been so right when he had said that all change is of itself an evil." Plump ("attractive in a fat Teutonic way"), jolly and style-conscious Harriet, in her middle fifties, has a fondness for young curates to whom she serves boiled chicken suppers and makes presents of hand-knitted socks and home-made jellies. We meet: The Reverend Edgar Donne, the latest in a long line of young curates fussed over by Harriet; Edith Liversidge ("a kind of decayed gentlewoman"), the disheveled, blunt-speaking neighbor with an interest in sanitation arrangements; the dreary, snobbish Connie Aspinall, who basks in the memory of her glory days when she was companion to Lady Grudge of Belgrave Square ("a kind of relation of one of Queen Alexandra's Ladies-in-Waiting"); Miss Prior, the touchy sewing woman, in a tender and humorous episode involving cauliflower cheese; the melancholy Count Ricardo Bianco, who on a regular basis offers proposals of marriage to Harriet. There is Archdeacon Hoccleve, the object of Belinda's devotion ("her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning"), whose standoffish behavior and proclivity for choosing unsuitable prayers and for preaching obscure literary sermons no one understands win him little favor among the people in his parish. And there are more matchless Pym characters set against a quintessential Pym story, touching and funny and quite wonderful.

Old age and reduced circumstances, 24 May 2008
Letty, Marcia, Norman and Edwin all work together in an office dealing with unspecified paperwork. Marcia has had a major operation and she and Letty are about to retire, leaving Norman and Edwin working. The style of writing is subtle and understated and the characters mildly eccentric -Marcia keeps well washed empty milk bottles in her garden shed. All four will be changed irrevocably by the end of the book.
The story deals with issues we must all face at some point in our lives. Loneliness, independence, being used and using. The minor characters are well realised - Mrs Pope - who Letty lodges with; Father G the priest with whom Edwin is friends; Marjorie who would like Letty to live with her if there are no better alternatives; and Janice - the social worker - who visits Marcia with the best of intentions.
Four people growing old and dealing with life's slings and arrows in the only way they know how. Of the four Letty is perhaps the most likeable, striving as she does to keep the peace, realising by the end of the book that Marjorie is not the best friend she could have and finding the courage to make her own choices. All four will stay in your mind long after you have finished reading. I shall definitely be looking for more books by Barbara Pym. If you like Anita Brookner you will enjoy this - Barbara Pym has the same acute eye for all the facets of everyday life.

A lovely book, 13 Apr 2008
Beautifully observed, restrained and unsensational, a lovely book of life and change. A fine modern classic.

Quartet in Autumn, 15 Sep 2007
A bittersweet novel about growing older in an England which seems to have almost entirely vanished. Miss Pym's characters are often sad, sometimes eccentric, but always engaging. Anyone who likes gentle humour and nostalgia will like this book.

We've come a long way, baby....., 10 Jan 2007
I chose this title because I wanted something gentle from another era. Although this book was published as recently as the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, (exactly thirty years before I penned this review), the thing that struck me most on reading it was how much society has evolved since then. F'rinstance, in no way could a modern person in their early sixties be deemed 'elderly', as Norman, Edwin, Letty and Marcia undoubtably were in 1977. The loneliness of their working lives and their daily existences is probably unimaginable in the twenty-first century. These are lives with the library and the radio is the only pleasures to be had, from an era where the telephone and television were still not absolutely the norm.


But is it? Miss Pym has given us a cautionary tale, a modern fable and a selection of well-drawn characters, particularly the eccentric Marcia with her milk bottles and her tinned produce. How easily could any of us become these four unfortunates if we allow it to happen? What a chastening thought.

Haunting work of art, 18 Apr 2006
Among the British novels of the last few decades I've read, this for me is easily one of the finest. Quartet in Autumn is written in an unshowy prose style, well poised and balanced. The four main characters are on the cusp of retirement - Letty, grumpy Norman, Marcia the eccentric collector of milk bottles, and church-obssessed Edwin. Sharing a drab office, they play off one another but none dominates, though Letty can be considered the book's centre of gravity. There are fine minor characters, Letty's friend Marjorie and Mrs Pope to name but two, who come vividly to life. There are laughs, but a vein of sadness of desolation runs through the work, gathering in intensity towards the end. Hidden in the quiet prose is a fairly savage critique of British society in the seventies, and particularly urban life, indifference to others, status distinction, narrowness. The four main characters are in no way sentimentalised. They're an odd unappealing bunch but the reader grows to love each of them almost grudgingly. In her own way Barbara Pym is worthy of the lineage of Austen and Dickens and in this novel has made a comparable achievement. We can't see this now, we're too dazzled by tinsel and glitter to pay homage to real writing: but in a century's time the book will hold up.

The antidote to "Desperate Housewives!", 12 Jul 2007
Miss Mildred Lathbury, the central character, leads a simple, proper life of doing good. She lives alone in post-WWII London, her limited social life centers around church activities. Like the very name Mildred, she is from a world so long gone we need reminding it ever existed! The book portrays an accurate picture of what British social interaction and morals used to be.

Into this world of dullness enter new characters who threaten the stability and indeed stir up storms (in teacups!). Mildred is torn back and forth, but never manages to get blown away with it all; almost despite herself she remains at the calm center, dispensing tea and good advice to one and all!

It is all very harmless, the action is slight, the characters are so poked with humour that it is hard to take them seriously. The tension is from Mildred's desire for something new and exciting - the feeling that life is passing her by, but what is on offer is never convincing. Her too sensible nature will not blind itself to the realities, it refuses to ignore the cons. She is ever true to her nature, her nature being restraint!

Light but at the same time deep. True - I'm sure everyone can find something here to resonate with their life.

Excellent Women, 22 Mar 2007
I was recently reccommended Barbara Pym, by a friend who knew I had enjoyed similar books to hers. This is the first one that I have read. What a treat it was. They just don't write books like this anymore I'm sorry to say. Mildred is a sweet likeable character from another time - considered middle aged at just over thirty - and pitied for being unmarried. In it Barbara Pym seems to be raising the issue of how it is society measures a woman's usefulness - and suggests that "the excellent women" of the title are the ones that people so often depend upon, but never marry - a question which in itself dates the book I suppose - but at the time may have been true for some women at least. I will be reading more by this author soon.



A marvellous book., 20 Dec 2002
Spinsters, vicars, and anthropologists. It doesn't sound very promising material, but this is one of the best Pyms. While being quietly funny (for instance, the moment when the heroine, having tasted beer for the first time in a pub, is disappointed because it tastes like dishwater), it nevertheless conveys the pathos of the lives of ordinary people like the vicar's unmarried sister, terribly distressed at the spite of his fiancee.
Mildred, the heroine, tells her story in the first person. She is a pillar of the parish who is drawn into the more exciting and dramatic world of her neighbours in the flat below, and then into anthropological circles. This last gives rise to a great deal of humour, as BP makes anthropology sound so ridiculous, if worthy.
One of the great things about BP is the way major charcters in one novel appear as minor characters in another; so, for instance, Allegra Grey is going to move to the parish of, so to speak, "A Glass of Blessings."

An excellent reading of Pym's novel, 07 Oct 2000
This is one of Barbara Pym's finest novels, and one of her funniest. Mildred Lathbury, a spinster in her 30's is living in a flat in London after the Second World War. She works part time helping distressed gentlewomen, and is one of the "excellent women" who are involved in her local church. When new neighbours arrive, she is taken into a different world, where anthropologists discuss kinship diagrams, and charming Naval husbands take her out for a drink in the afternoon. At the same time, she is dealing with her friend Winifred, whose brother the vicar is taking too much of an interest in their new lodger,an attractive widow. Juliet Stevenson's reading of the novel is wonderful. She differentiates Mildred's irony from Winifred's almost puppy-like enthusiasm, and Helena Napier's sophistication from Everard Bone's pose of world-weariness with ease. An excellent recording.

A glass of praise, 26 Sep 2008
A Glass of Blessings (along with Excellent Women) is one of my favourite Pym novels and certainly the funniest. I'm not sure why she is compared to Jane Austen (she owes no more to her than do a lot of other writers both male and female) or why the cover blurb says she makes readers smile. Most readers will be reduced to laughing out loud - this novel of 1950s mores seems hardly to have dated at all, despite taking as its subject the leisured life of a stay-at-home wife and the amorous adventures of various clergymen.

Rather, she is a kind of ecclesiastical version of Nancy Mitford as the various inhabitants of a London parish and the more worldly-world of the disolute Piers and Keith come under the superior eye of Wilmet. I particularly liked the verger's (I think) joy at discovering dry rot in the church ("It will make a man of him") and Mr. Bason's career as a chef-cum-antiques shop manager in Devon. Highly recommended

Will Wilmet Meet Herself?, 23 Jun 2004
Narrated by the shallow Wilmet, Glass of Blessings showcases Pym's wonderfully observant characterizations and contradictory impulses. Wilmet herself observes and comments but the reader soon learns that this self-absorbed woman is a narrator flawfully unself-aware. Pym includes deliciously witty commentary on class, church, and love through Wilmet's first person narration. No plot to speak of, naturally, but the question of Wilmet's realizing some understanding of love, of herself moves the reader through this sly wonderful novel, full of the blessings of Pym's irony.

Quiet drama, 18 Oct 2002
We are in 1950s London with an excellent cast of characters. The pathalogically domesticated Keith, forever washing down paintwork and boiling discloths in Tide; Father Thames, the gourmet priest with a penchant for Lapsang Souchong which can never be satisfied at parish get-togethers; and the kleptomaniac Wilf Bason, housekeeper at the clergy house, whose idea of a suitable meal for Lent is fried octopus; these are among the best.
Wilmet, the heroine, self-absorbed but aware to some extent of her failings, skims the surface of life without engaging with it. She is shocked out of her complacency by a series of events relating mainly to the novel's gay couple, Keith and Piers. When it was published, homosexuality was against the law, so it was a subversive element. However, it is handled with matter-of-factness, and there is very little Angst, except that Piers drinks more than is good for him, which could happen to any one.
Wilmet avoids being totally unsympathetic by the tone of her interior monologues, which have a lot in common with those of Miss Pym's spinster heroines - these include the references to Victorian literature and the interest in the details of other peoples' lives (as long as they are "people like us").
A top class Pym.

Wilmet's blessings, 07 Oct 2000
Wilmet Forsyrh is an attractive woman in her 30's with not enough to do. She lives with her husband, Rodney, in her mother-in-law Sybil's house in London, and fills up her days with lunchtime church services and idle speculations about her friends. Wilmet's assumptions about her husband, her friends and her own life are usually mistaken, yet we want to believe in them just as much as Wilmet does. At the end of the novel, Wilmet has to come to terms with her mistakes, and she realises how lucky she really is. Some of Pym's best character names are in this novel- Piers Longridge, Wilfred Basin and Marius Ransome (the curate) among them. Susan Jameson's reading of the novel is excellent. She gives Wilmet a touch of wistfulness which is just right, and she has fun with the kleptomaniac Mr Basin. A great recording.

Not Pym's best, 25 Sep 2008
I enjoy Barbara Pym's novels generally but she is definitely off form with this outing. Perhaps it is because she is describing the lives and (disappointing) loves of two female friends who were at Oxford University together, that there seems to be a lack of drama to move events along. Or rather, there is not the clash of characters or unexpected event which drives most novels.

The introduction by Jilly Cooper doesn't improve things much. Comparing Pym to Jane Austen is neither original or particularly revealing and you end up feeling you have discovered more about Cooper's life than the background to the novel. All in all this really isn't in the same class as Excellent Women or A Glass of Blessings, my two favourite Barbara Pym tomes.

Not worthy of the many reprints, 01 Sep 2008
Light and frothy, with very unbelievable characters. If you enjoy dated tales about 2 dimensional characters - this is for you! If not, try anything by Khalid Hosseini!

social satire and the fifities, 31 May 2008
A novel that gives the authentic flavour of the middle class gentility in the 1950s. If this sounds dull, it really isn't.

Her anthropological view of the society she is examining is so wry, pitiless but so humorous (She worked at the International African Institute in London for some years, and played a large part in the editing of its scholarly journal, Africa, hence the frequency with which anthropology/anthropologists crop up in her novels, and maybe foregrounds her social criticism.) The hopeless vagaries of men of the cloth as well as academics come under her scornful microsopic scrutiny. Her single women, devout and well-meaning, live lives of virtuous 'quiet desperation'.

Her writing is succinct and clear, hardly a word wasted. She has often been compared to Jane Austen, but she also shares the sharp eye of Waugh in a novel like "A Handful of Dust'.

A World that is gone forever, 20 May 2007
This is a wonderful book, a very English setting, and some very English characters who inhabit a world that is gone forever. Prudence is a character many of us can sympathise with, her past littered with disappointments. Her interfering friend Jane - who is much older, married with an almost grown up daughter, is keen to help her become settled. Jane despite her being a middle aged clergy wife is still wonderfully romantic, and it demonstrates superbly, how, no matter how we age, and take on various responsibilities, we still have the same concerns as in our youth. This is the second Barbara Pym novel I have read - and I am now keen to read them all

A beautiful past, 28 Aug 2008
Some Tame Gazelle is set in a village just as picturesque as St Mary Mead or any other literary village, but the characters are deeper and utterly credible. It is full of moments of recognition, such as Belinda's joy at making pasta, 'finer than the finest chamois leather' and who has not had sudden guests and felt guilty at the withered orange in the bowl? It gently and tellingly relays what has been described as the beauty of the unregarded life, and points out that romance is on offer, even there. It repays rereading, for the more subtle humour can be sometimes missed on a first read. It is a brilliant book, and its layers reveal themselves slowly as one becomes more and more drawn into the lives of the Bede sisters.

Touching and funny, 22 Apr 2001
In the early chapters of "Some Tame Gazelle" we are taken on a "Pym moments" romp through the day-to-day lives of the spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede. Timid, sentimental Belinda (another of Pym's "Excellent Women"), elder of the two, a faithful church worker, has loved the peevish, married Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve ("dear Henry") for over 30 years. Belinda quotes 18th Century poets, wears "sensible" shoes and longs for "some sympathetic person to whom she could say that Dr. Johnson had been so right when he had said that all change is of itself an evil." Plump ("attractive in a fat Teutonic way"), jolly and style-conscious Harriet, in her middle fifties, has a fondness for young curates to whom she serves boiled chicken suppers and makes presents of hand-knitted socks and home-made jellies. We meet: The Reverend Edgar Donne, the latest in a long line of young curates fussed over by Harriet; Edith Liversidge ("a kind of decayed gentlewoman"), the disheveled, blunt-speaking neighbor with an interest in sanitation arrangements; the dreary, snobbish Connie Aspinall, who basks in the memory of her glory days when she was companion to Lady Grudge of Belgrave Square ("a kind of relation of one of Queen Alexandra's Ladies-in-Waiting"); Miss Prior, the touchy sewing woman, in a tender and humorous episode involving cauliflower cheese; the melancholy Count Ricardo Bianco, who on a regular basis offers proposals of marriage to Harriet. There is Archdeacon Hoccleve, the object of Belinda's devotion ("her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning"), whose standoffish behavior and proclivity for choosing unsuitable prayers and for preaching obscure literary sermons no one understands win him little favor among the people in his parish. And there are more matchless Pym characters set against a quintessential Pym story, touching and funny and quite wonderful.

Old age and reduced circumstances, 24 May 2008
Letty, Marcia, Norman and Edwin all work together in an office dealing with unspecified paperwork. Marcia has had a major operation and she and Letty are about to retire, leaving Norman and Edwin working. The style of writing is subtle and understated and the characters mildly eccentric -Marcia keeps well washed empty milk bottles in her garden shed. All four will be changed irrevocably by the end of the book.
The story deals with issues we must all face at some point in our lives. Loneliness, independence, being used and using. The minor characters are well realised - Mrs Pope - who Letty lodges with; Father G the priest with whom Edwin is friends; Marjorie who would like Letty to live with her if there are no better alternatives; and Janice - the social worker - who visits Marcia with the best of intentions.
Four people growing old and dealing with life's slings and arrows in the only way they know how. Of the four Letty is perhaps the most likeable, striving as she does to keep the peace, realising by the end of the book that Marjorie is not the best friend she could have and finding the courage to make her own choices. All four will stay in your mind long after you have finished reading. I shall definitely be looking for more books by Barbara Pym. If you like Anita Brookner you will enjoy this - Barbara Pym has the same acute eye for all the facets of everyday life.

A lovely book, 13 Apr 2008
Beautifully observed, restrained and unsensational, a lovely book of life and change. A fine modern classic.

Quartet in Autumn, 15 Sep 2007
A bittersweet novel about growing older in an England which seems to have almost entirely vanished. Miss Pym's characters are often sad, sometimes eccentric, but always engaging. Anyone who likes gentle humour and nostalgia will like this book.

We've come a long way, baby....., 10 Jan 2007
I chose this title because I wanted something gentle from another era. Although this book was published as recently as the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, (exactly thirty years before I penned this review), the thing that struck me most on reading it was how much society has evolved since then. F'rinstance, in no way could a modern person in their early sixties be deemed 'elderly', as Norman, Edwin, Letty and Marcia undoubtably were in 1977. The loneliness of their working lives and their daily existences is probably unimaginable in the twenty-first century. These are lives with the library and the radio is the only pleasures to be had, from an era where the telephone and television were still not absolutely the norm.


But is it? Miss Pym has given us a cautionary tale, a modern fable and a selection of well-drawn characters, particularly the eccentric Marcia with her milk bottles and her tinned produce. How easily could any of us become these four unfortunates if we allow it to happen? What a chastening thought.

Haunting work of art, 18 Apr 2006
Among the British novels of the last few decades I've read, this for me is easily one of the finest. Quartet in Autumn is written in an unshowy prose style, well poised and balanced. The four main characters are on the cusp of retirement - Letty, grumpy Norman, Marcia the eccentric collector of milk bottles, and church-obssessed Edwin. Sharing a drab office, they play off one another but none dominates, though Letty can be considered the book's centre of gravity. There are fine minor characters, Letty's friend Marjorie and Mrs Pope to name but two, who come vividly to life. There are laughs, but a vein of sadness of desolation runs through the work, gathering in intensity towards the end. Hidden in the quiet prose is a fairly savage critique of British society in the seventies, and particularly urban life, indifference to others, status distinction, narrowness. The four main characters are in no way sentimentalised. They're an odd unappealing bunch but the reader grows to love each of them almost grudgingly. In her own way Barbara Pym is worthy of the lineage of Austen and Dickens and in this novel has made a comparable achievement. We can't see this now, we're too dazzled by tinsel and glitter to pay homage to real writing: but in a century's time the book will hold up.

Worth reading for Pym fans., 19 May 2003
This is somehow an atypical Pym novel, or perhaps it's more true to say that Leonora is an atypical heroine, less easy to relate to than most. She has money and a certain position, yet her life is empty.
There is an attempt to be "modern," with some bisexuality and a gay man; as usual, this is done elegantly and quietly - BP had some understanding of this what we would call "lifestyle." These characters, however, are nothing like as much fun as Piers and Keith in "A Glass of Blessings," although the Keats scholar, Ned, is what Leonora would describe as "amusing."
It's a sad novel with amusing (not "amusing") parts. I think BP wrote it when she was beginning to be ill, so perhaps that explains something.

The antidote to "Desperate Housewives!", 12 Jul 2007
Miss Mildred Lathbury, the central character, leads a simple, proper life of doing good. She lives alone in post-WWII London, her limited social life centers around church activities. Like the very name Mildred, she is from a world so long gone we need reminding it ever existed! The book portrays an accurate picture of what British social interaction and morals used to be.

Into this world of dullness enter new characters who threaten the stability and indeed stir up storms (in teacups!). Mildred is torn back and forth, but never manages to get blown away with it all; almost despite herself she remains at the calm center, dispensing tea and good advice to one and all!

It is all very harmless, the action is slight, the characters are so poked with humour that it is hard to take them seriously. The tension is from Mildred's desire for something new and exciting - the feeling that life is passing her by, but what is on offer is never convincing. Her too sensible nature will not blind itself to the realities, it refuses to ignore the cons. She is ever true to her nature, her nature being restraint!

Light but at the same time deep. True - I'm sure everyone can find something here to resonate with their life.

Excellent Women, 22 Mar 2007
I was recently reccommended Barbara Pym, by a friend who knew I had enjoyed similar books to hers. This is the first one that I have read. What a treat it was. They just don't write books like this anymore I'm sorry to say. Mildred is a sweet likeable character from another time - considered middle aged at just over thirty - and pitied for being unmarried. In it Barbara Pym seems to be raising the issue of how it is society measures a woman's usefulness - and suggests that "the excellent women" of the title are the ones that people so often depend upon, but never marry - a question which in itself dates the book I suppose - but at the time may have been true for some women at least. I will be reading more by this author soon.



A marvellous book., 20 Dec 2002
Spinsters, vicars, and anthropologists. It doesn't sound very promising material, but this is one of the best Pyms. While being quietly funny (for instance, the moment when the heroine, having tasted beer for the first time in a pub, is disappointed because it tastes like dishwater), it nevertheless conveys the pathos of the lives of ordinary people like the vicar's unmarried sister, terribly distressed at the spite of his fiancee.
Mildred, the heroine, tells her story in the first person. She is a pillar of the parish who is drawn into the more exciting and dramatic world of her neighbours in the flat below, and then into anthropological circles. This last gives rise to a great deal of humour, as BP makes anthropology sound so ridiculous, if worthy.
One of the great things about BP is the way major charcters in one novel appear as minor characters in another; so, for instance, Allegra Grey is going to move to the parish of, so to speak, "A Glass of Blessings."

An excellent reading of Pym's novel, 07 Oct 2000
This is one of Barbara Pym's finest novels, and one of her funniest. Mildred Lathbury, a spinster in her 30's is living in a flat in London after the Second World War. She works part time helping distressed gentlewomen, and is one of the "excellent women" who are involved in her local church. When new neighbours arrive, she is taken into a different world, where anthropologists discuss kinship diagrams, and charming Naval husbands take her out for a drink in the afternoon. At the same time, she is dealing with her friend Winifred, whose brother the vicar is taking too much of an interest in their new lodger,an attractive widow. Juliet Stevenson's reading of the novel is wonderful. She differentiates Mildred's irony from Winifred's almost puppy-like enthusiasm, and Helena Napier's sophistication from Everard Bone's pose of world-weariness with ease. An excellent recording.

A glass of praise, 26 Sep 2008
A Glass of Blessings (along with Excellent Women) is one of my favourite Pym novels and certainly the funniest. I'm not sure why she is compared to Jane Austen (she owes no more to her than do a lot of other writers both male and female) or why the cover blurb says she makes readers smile. Most readers will be reduced to laughing out loud - this novel of 1950s mores seems hardly to have dated at all, despite taking as its subject the leisured life of a stay-at-home wife and the amorous adventures of various clergymen.

Rather, she is a kind of ecclesiastical version of Nancy Mitford as the various inhabitants of a London parish and the more worldly-world of the disolute Piers and Keith come under the superior eye of Wilmet. I particularly liked the verger's (I think) joy at discovering dry rot in the church ("It will make a man of him") and Mr. Bason's career as a chef-cum-antiques shop manager in Devon. Highly recommended

Will Wilmet Meet Herself?, 23 Jun 2004
Narrated by the shallow Wilmet, Glass of Blessings showcases Pym's wonderfully observant characterizations and contradictory impulses. Wilmet herself observes and comments but the reader soon learns that this self-absorbed woman is a narrator flawfully unself-aware. Pym includes deliciously witty commentary on class, church, and love through Wilmet's first person narration. No plot to speak of, naturally, but the question of Wilmet's realizing some understanding of love, of herself moves the reader through this sly wonderful novel, full of the blessings of Pym's irony.

Quiet drama, 18 Oct 2002
We are in 1950s London with an excellent cast of characters. The pathalogically domesticated Keith, forever washing down paintwork and boiling discloths in Tide; Father Thames, the gourmet priest with a penchant for Lapsang Souchong which can never be satisfied at parish get-togethers; and the kleptomaniac Wilf Bason, housekeeper at the clergy house, whose idea of a suitable meal for Lent is fried octopus; these are among the best.
Wilmet, the heroine, self-absorbed but aware to some extent of her failings, skims the surface of life without engaging with it. She is shocked out of her complacency by a series of events relating mainly to the novel's gay couple, Keith and Piers. When it was published, homosexuality was against the law, so it was a subversive element. However, it is handled with matter-of-factness, and there is very little Angst, except that Piers drinks more than is good for him, which could happen to any one.
Wilmet avoids being totally unsympathetic by the tone of her interior monologues, which have a lot in common with those of Miss Pym's spinster heroines - these include the references to Victorian literature and the interest in the details of other peoples' lives (as long as they are "people like us").
A top class Pym.

Wilmet's blessings, 07 Oct 2000
Wilmet Forsyrh is an attractive woman in her 30's with not enough to do. She lives with her husband, Rodney, in her mother-in-law Sybil's house in London, and fills up her days with lunchtime church services and idle speculations about her friends. Wilmet's assumptions about her husband, her friends and her own life are usually mistaken, yet we want to believe in them just as much as Wilmet does. At the end of the novel, Wilmet has to come to terms with her mistakes, and she realises how lucky she really is. Some of Pym's best character names are in this novel- Piers Longridge, Wilfred Basin and Marius Ransome (the curate) among them. Susan Jameson's reading of the novel is excellent. She gives Wilmet a touch of wistfulness which is just right, and she has fun with the kleptomaniac Mr Basin. A great recording.

Not Pym's best, 25 Sep 2008
I enjoy Barbara Pym's novels generally but she is definitely off form with this outing. Perhaps it is because she is describing the lives and (disappointing) loves of two female friends who were at Oxford University together, that there seems to be a lack of drama to move events along. Or rather, there is not the clash of characters or unexpected event which drives most novels.

The introduction by Jilly Cooper doesn't improve things much. Comparing Pym to Jane Austen is neither original or particularly revealing and you end up feeling you have discovered more about Cooper's life than the background to the novel. All in all this really isn't in the same class as Excellent Women or A Glass of Blessings, my two favourite Barbara Pym tomes.

Not worthy of the many reprints, 01 Sep 2008
Light and frothy, with very unbelievable characters. If you enjoy dated tales about 2 dimensional characters - this is for you! If not, try anything by Khalid Hosseini!

social satire and the fifities, 31 May 2008
A novel that gives the authentic flavour of the middle class gentility in the 1950s. If this sounds dull, it really isn't.

Her anthropological view of the society she is examining is so wry, pitiless but so humorous (She worked at the International African Institute in London for some years, and played a large part in the editing of its scholarly journal, Africa, hence the frequency with which anthropology/anthropologists crop up in her novels, and maybe foregrounds her social criticism.) The hopeless vagaries of men of the cloth as well as academics come under her scornful microsopic scrutiny. Her single women, devout and well-meaning, live lives of virtuous 'quiet desperation'.

Her writing is succinct and clear, hardly a word wasted. She has often been compared to Jane Austen, but she also shares the sharp eye of Waugh in a novel like "A Handful of Dust'.

A World that is gone forever, 20 May 2007
This is a wonderful book, a very English setting, and some very English characters who inhabit a world that is gone forever. Prudence is a character many of us can sympathise with, her past littered with disappointments. Her interfering friend Jane - who is much older, married with an almost grown up daughter, is keen to help her become settled. Jane despite her being a middle aged clergy wife is still wonderfully romantic, and it demonstrates superbly, how, no matter how we age, and take on various responsibilities, we still have the same concerns as in our youth. This is the second Barbara Pym novel I have read - and I am now keen to read them all

A beautiful past, 28 Aug 2008
Some Tame Gazelle is set in a village just as picturesque as St Mary Mead or any other literary village, but the characters are deeper and utterly credible. It is full of moments of recognition, such as Belinda's joy at making pasta, 'finer than the finest chamois leather' and who has not had sudden guests and felt guilty at the withered orange in the bowl? It gently and tellingly relays what has been described as the beauty of the unregarded life, and points out that romance is on offer, even there. It repays rereading, for the more subtle humour can be sometimes missed on a first read. It is a brilliant book, and its layers reveal themselves slowly as one becomes more and more drawn into the lives of the Bede sisters.

Touching and funny, 22 Apr 2001
In the early chapters of "Some Tame Gazelle" we are taken on a "Pym moments" romp through the day-to-day lives of the spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede. Timid, sentimental Belinda (another of Pym's "Excellent Women"), elder of the two, a faithful church worker, has loved the peevish, married Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve ("dear Henry") for over 30 years. Belinda quotes 18th Century poets, wears "sensible" shoes and longs for "some sympathetic person to whom she could say that Dr. Johnson had been so right when he had said that all change is of itself an evil." Plump ("attractive in a fat Teutonic way"), jolly and style-conscious Harriet, in her middle fifties, has a fondness for young curates to whom she serves boiled chicken suppers and makes presents of hand-knitted socks and home-made jellies. We meet: The Reverend Edgar Donne, the latest in a long line of young curates fussed over by Harriet; Edith Liversidge ("a kind of decayed gentlewoman"), the disheveled, blunt-speaking neighbor with an interest in sanitation arrangements; the dreary, snobbish Connie Aspinall, who basks in the memory of her glory days when she was companion to Lady Grudge of Belgrave Square ("a kind of relation of one of Queen Alexandra's Ladies-in-Waiting"); Miss Prior, the touchy sewing woman, in a tender and humorous episode involving cauliflower cheese; the melancholy Count Ricardo Bianco, who on a regular basis offers proposals of marriage to Harriet. There is Archdeacon Hoccleve, the object of Belinda's devotion ("her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning"), whose standoffish behavior and proclivity for choosing unsuitable prayers and for preaching obscure literary sermons no one understands win him little favor among the people in his parish. And there are more matchless Pym characters set against a quintessential Pym story, touching and funny and quite wonderful.

Old age and reduced circumstances, 24 May 2008
Letty, Marcia, Norman and Edwin all work together in an office dealing with unspecified paperwork. Marcia has had a major operation and she and Letty are about to retire, leaving Norman and Edwin working. The style of writing is subtle and understated and the characters mildly eccentric -Marcia keeps well washed empty milk bottles in her garden shed. All four will be changed irrevocably by the end of the book.
The story deals with issues we must all face at some point in our lives. Loneliness, independence, being used and using. The minor characters are well realised - Mrs Pope - who Letty lodges with; Father G the priest with whom Edwin is friends; Marjorie who would like Letty to live with her if there are no better alternatives; and Janice - the social worker - who visits Marcia with the best of intentions.
Four people growing old and dealing with life's slings and arrows in the only way they know how. Of the four Letty is perhaps the most likeable, striving as she does to keep the peace, realising by the end of the book that Marjorie is not the best friend she could have and finding the courage to make her own choices. All four will stay in your mind long after you have finished reading. I shall definitely be looking for more books by Barbara Pym. If you like Anita Brookner you will enjoy this - Barbara Pym has the same acute eye for all the facets of everyday life.

A lovely book, 13 Apr 2008
Beautifully observed, restrained and unsensational, a lovely book of life and change. A fine modern classic.

Quartet in Autumn, 15 Sep 2007
A bittersweet novel about growing older in an England which seems to have almost entirely vanished. Miss Pym's characters are often sad, sometimes eccentric, but always engaging. Anyone who likes gentle humour and nostalgia will like this book.

We've come a long way, baby....., 10 Jan 2007
I chose this title because I wanted something gentle from another era. Although this book was published as recently as the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, (exactly thirty years before I penned this review), the thing that struck me most on reading it was how much society has evolved since then. F'rinstance, in no way could a modern person in their early sixties be deemed 'elderly', as Norman, Edwin, Letty and Marcia undoubtably were in 1977. The loneliness of their working lives and their daily existences is probably unimaginable in the twenty-first century. These are lives with the library and the radio is the only pleasures to be had, from an era where the telephone and television were still not absolutely the norm.


But is it? Miss Pym has given us a cautionary tale, a modern fable and a selection of well-drawn characters, particularly the eccentric Marcia with her milk bottles and her tinned produce. How easily could any of us become these four unfortunates if we allow it to happen? What a chastening thought.

Haunting work of art, 18 Apr 2006
Among the British novels of the last few decades I've read, this for me is easily one of the finest. Quartet in Autumn is written in an unshowy prose style, well poised and balanced. The four main characters are on the cusp of retirement - Letty, grumpy Norman, Marcia the eccentric collector of milk bottles, and church-obssessed Edwin. Sharing a drab office, they play off one another but none dominates, though Letty can be considered the book's centre of gravity. There are fine minor characters, Letty's friend Marjorie and Mrs Pope to name but two, who come vividly to life. There are laughs, but a vein of sadness of desolation runs through the work, gathering in intensity towards the end. Hidden in the quiet prose is a fairly savage critique of British society in the seventies, and particularly urban life, indifference to others, status distinction, narrowness. The four main characters are in no way sentimentalised. They're an odd unappealing bunch but the reader grows to love each of them almost grudgingly. In her own way Barbara Pym is worthy of the lineage of Austen and Dickens and in this novel has made a comparable achievement. We can't see this now, we're too dazzled by tinsel and glitter to pay homage to real writing: but in a century's time the book will hold up.

Worth reading for Pym fans., 19 May 2003
This is somehow an atypical Pym novel, or perhaps it's more true to say that Leonora is an atypical heroine, less easy to relate to than most. She has money and a certain position, yet her life is empty.
There is an attempt to be "modern," with some bisexuality and a gay man; as usual, this is done elegantly and quietly - BP had some understanding of this what we would call "lifestyle." These characters, however, are nothing like as much fun as Piers and Keith in "A Glass of Blessings," although the Keats scholar, Ned, is what Leonora would describe as "amusing."
It's a sad novel with amusing (not "amusing") parts. I think BP wrote it when she was beginning to be ill, so perhaps that explains something.

Worth reading for Pym fans., 19 May 2003
This is somehow an atypical Pym novel, or perhaps it's more true to say that Leonora is an atypical heroine, less easy to relate to than most. She has money and a certain position, yet her life is empty.
There is an attempt to be "modern," with some bisexuality and a gay man; as usual, this is done elegantly and quietly - BP had some understanding of this what we would call "lifestyle." These characters, however, are nothing like as much fun as Piers and Keith in "A Glass of Blessings," although the Keats scholar, Ned, is what Leonora would describe as "amusing."
It's a sad novel with amusing (not "amusing") parts. I think BP wrote it when she was beginning to be ill, so perhaps that explains something.