Rating: 
Summary: Life is Like This - Funny, Sad
Review: I thought many times while reading this book -- Yes, life is like this. The narrator, Mildred Lathbury, is 30+ years old, an orphan and single in the 1950s. She leads a solitary life -- of course that doesn't stop her from being intelligent and witty and understanding. What I realized near the end of the book is what Mildred didn't notice --- that the men around her would have loved her if she had encouraged their love (but she never picked up on it) She seemed to be learning near the end...and maybe there was hope for her and Everard Bone. Either way Mildred was going to turn out o.k. Her observations about the people around her are priceless.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant social commentary on a certain British lifestyle
Review: If there were a Jane Austen award, (for carefully controlled rage, perfect understanding of a selected social situation, and a light elegant touch) Pym would qualify. `Excellent Women' is one of her funniest books, and one that I can whole-heartedly recommend to anyone who wants a more perceptive version of Miss Read. Pym was a sorely underrated writer during her lifetime. After her death, Hazel Holt put together her last novel `An Academic Question' (although that was written in the hiatus of the 70s). In her introduction to it, Holt writes that Pym tried very hard to make it sound Margaret Drabble-ish. Which is a great pity because Pym had her own voice. An intelligent voice, a perceptive voice and a popular one too. That is always such a problem. If you're popular, the automatic elitism built into literature sats, you must be bad. Pym isn't. Read her and you'll find out why I'm waxing eloquent about a woman who writes about a situation so diffeent from mine.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Read
Review: If you ever wanted to "time travel" to London in the years after the war, read this book. Pym creates a somewhat episodic novel, but the world she creates pulls the reader into this book, often again and again. Mildred Lathbury negotiates her life as a spinster, among the "excellent women," but we love her personality and her observations on the life around her in the church, her work, her friends and even an anthropology society. Her characters are so well-rounded they can walk out of the pages of this book. Rocky Napier, the former Naval officer, is probably one of Pym's most interesting characters...read the book just to fall in love with Rocky.
Rating:
Summary: Is there an anthropologist in the parish?
Review: In Excellent Women, the protagonist Mildred Lathbury floats between two seemingly opposite cultures, a high Catholic (though not Roman, heaven forfend) city parish and a circle of anthropologically-inclined academics. And yet who are the observers and who are the observed?Mildred displays, in the words of a John Updike quot. in the front of my used paperback, "crystalline discrimination". She presents keen observations with an almost social scientific veracity. She frequently questions whether her insights are quite objective or, well, Christian while describing many heavy handed attempts of other characters to define her status as an excellent woman so that her role will meet their sundry self-centered needs. And yet, even as she sees through these attempts, Miss Lathbury wonders if she does not also seek out such a role while exerting some control over its implied responsibilities. Pym creates a character with the wisdom to see situations from many perspectives, which includes understanding the futility of openly stating her perceptions. Ultimately Mildred conducts an acute examination of self and one's possibilities to romantically bond with another at a time and in a culture where open introspection and direct expressoin was not quite the thing. EW beautifully illustrates the negotiations everyone makes to connect to others in a suitably rewarding fashion. The reader witnesses this excellent woman reflecting on the extent to which she has chosen her fate, stayed true to her ideas about romance and compatibility, and established terms for the various connections she has with those asking for a share of her time and space. Mildred is a perceptive character who's very much a product of her time, yet able to see herself so clearly that her observations are timeless.
Rating:
Summary: Mildred Lathbury is an excellent woman...
Review: Mildred is sturdy, dependable and can always be counted upon to have a cup of tea ready in a crisis. But does she yearn for more? A comedy about spinsterhood that leaves a touch of sadness in its wake.
Rating:
Summary: Snicker, chortle, snicker, weep
Review: Mildred Lathbury is a hilariously sharp but kind observer as she becomes embroiled in the romantic messes of both the Father at her church and her exotic new neighbours. Along the way, Mildred reevaluates her own role as one of the "excellent women" who can always be relied upon for a hot cup of tea or help polishing church brasses. Excellent Women often had me cackling out loud, though sometimes it was the kind of laughter that comes from giving the funny bone a solid whack on the table. The subject matter and understated humour justify comparisons with Austen's Persuasion though the tone and style remind me rather more of Rose MacAuley's Towers of Trebizond.
Rating:
Summary: Anything may be the business of an unattached woman
Review: Mildred Lathbury was tied up with Father Malory and church affairs when she encountered Helena Napier in her apartment house on the wrong side of Victoria Station. (Such nice touches are a constant feature of Barbara Pym's writing.) Mrs. Napier was an anthropologist and Rockingham Napier was in the military service. Mrs. Napier confessed that Rocky knew nothing about anthropology and could care less. Mildred answered the door when Helena was out.
Julian Malory and his sister Winifred were Mildred's friends. Winifred wanted Mildred to move into some rooms at the vicarage and Mildred resisted the idea since she wanted to maintain her privacy. Later Mildred learned that a Mrs. Gray, a clergyman's widow, was to move into the rooms.
When visiting the Napiers, Mildred saw that Helena was making kinship diagrams. In time Mildred met Everard Bone, an anthropologist friend of Helena. She saw him at a weekday service at St Ermin's and learned that he was a religious convert and, therefore, an enthusiastic church-goer.
At the church jumble sale, where Mildred has a hand in the planning, it is learned that someone sends in stuffed birds every time. Rockingham Napier appeared at Mildred's flat while an old school friend, Dora, was visiting. This was around the time when it was learned that the vicar was going to marry Mrs. Gray. Rocky said that if Mildred was sad about that development he would find her an anthropologist.
Next Rocky reported that Helena had left him. Ultimately Mildred had a role in reviving the marriage of the Napiers and busied herself with numerous other matters in an understanding and humorous way. This is a splendid example of the achievement of Barbara Pym.
Rating:
Summary: A billiantly conceived protagonist
Review: Ms. Lathbury is a 30-something unmarried woman in 1950's smalltown England. She is the voice of this novel, one of edgy humor, the pathos of repressed and unrealized romanticism, and an acceptance of men's lax attitude towards her without a trace of self-pity. Pym does indeed remind one of Austen, in her voicing of women in a secondary place in society, too dependent upon men and marriage, in an era now gone-by, the era of postwar England no less distant than Austen's. "Excellent women" are those "old maids" who are not very attractive physically, and are therefore - however unfairly - the half-seen nurturers of their society. The men are - each and every one - presumptuous, myopic, self-indulgent. Yet Lathbury sees them clearly but without bitterness, and without fatalism. This is a delicately written, observant and complexly perceptive novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Should rename it 'Excellent Women and the Men Who Use Them'
Review: My book group members and I discussed the book a bit by email before our meeting. One of our members could not attend, and sent this encapsulation, which the rest of us felt did a great job of summarizing the group's take on the book. She wrote, "I didn't think the book was all that bad, although I kept waiting for the wit to appear. She does throw in a FEW good lines, but remember this was postwar England and levity was not the order of the day. One has to wonder, though, about just how excellent a woman can be if she works only mornings- looking through index cards- and needs the rest of the day to rinse out her flimsies in the kitchen sink, given that she has a housekeeper for a one-bedroom flat with no loo !!! Excellent, maybe, but in a FEEB kind of way . Maybe the title should read EXCELLENT WOMEN AND THE MEN WHO USE THEM. Lather, rinse, repeat,lather, rinse, repeat, lather, rinse, repeat... What !? tea-time already !? It was a painless read, anyway, so that's one redeeming thought."
Rating: 
Summary: Charming book about 1950's London middle-class society
Review: Pym's novel is beautifully written from the point of view of a thirty-something single clergy-man's daughters' point of view. Barbara Pym's characters are realistically drawn and thoroughly believable. Tea is forever being made, references to post-WWII London rations are skillfully described and the comedy is genuine. The heroine hasn't a self-pitying bone in her body. She's impossible not to love.
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