"Excellent Women" is one of Barbara Pymas richest and most amusing high comedies. Mildred Lathbury is a clergymanas daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those aexcellent women, a the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighborsaanthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next doorathe novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.
