Excellent Women - Barbara Pym Audiobook

Written by Barbara Pym
Read by Jonathan Keeble, Gerry Halligan
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 48 Kbps
Unabridged

This is not my rip. My thanks to the original uploader

Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble, Gerry Halligan
Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
Categories: Classics, British Literature

Excellent Women is probably the most famous of Barbara Pym’s novels. The acclaim a few years ago for this early comic novel, which was hailed by Lord David Cecil as one of ‘the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years,’ helped launch the rediscovery of the author’s entire work. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman’s daughter and a spinster in the England of the 1950s, one of those ‘excellent women’ who tend to get involved in other people’s lives - such as those of her new neighbor, Rockingham, and the vicar next door. This is Barbara Pym’s world at its funniest. (Fantastic Fiction)

Book discription (Audible.com):

Mildred Lathbury is one of those ‘excellent women’ who is often taken for granted. She is a godsend, ‘capable of dealing with most of the stock situations of life - birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sales, the garden fete spoilt by bad weather’. As such, she often gets herself embroiled in other people’s lives - especially those of her glamorous new neighbours, the Napiers, whose marriage seems to be on the rocks.

One cannot take sides in these matters, though it is tricky, especially as Mildred, teetering on the edge of spinsterhood, has a soft spot for dashing young Rockingham Napier. This is Barbara Pym’s world at its funniest and most touching.

©1952 Barbara Pym (P)2011 Hachette Digital