Not the ideal reader for Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym is well aware that she is writing in the "high comic" tradition of Austen, brought up to date for the mid-20th century; she even has her narrator, in Excellent Women (1952) remark that hers is a life story of small occasions, not wars, fights, tragedies that usually form the basis for most novels, literary and otherwise. Her characters are prim and proper and leading circumscribed lives; Mildred (the drabness of the name typifies the narrative), the narrator of EW, is an unmarried 30+ and unlikely, by her account ever to marry - and same for most of the others in her life; the only married couple we meet so far (100 pp in) in this novel is the somewhat racy Rockwell and Helena couple. High drama occurs when Mildren's friend, the rector of her church, is seen holding hands in public w/ his new tenant, the recently widowed (her husband was also a church man) Allegra (?). The typical scenes in this novel: drama surrounding church members shirking their responsibilities at the weekly "jumble sale"; a boring lecture at a learned society, followed by questions that the narrator cannot understand; the annual lunch w/ her best friend's brother - yet another fussy lifelong bachelor - who is eager for gossip and is rude and oblivious about Mildred (she notices flowers for sale after the lunch, and he does not offer to buy them for her!). At this point, I throw up my hands and cry: Enough! Or, more precisely: Not enough! I appreciate Pym's fidelity to her cause, the minor interior dramas of everyday, circumscribed life; I admire her occasional forays into topicality: we get a sense of postwar London and the persisting; in particular, a service in a church still half in rubble. I see the parallels w/ Austen - as it seems part of the theme is overcoming harsh and sometimes inaccurate first impressions, and gradually - perhaps - learning to love another (and one's self). But I'm smothered by the closeness and the tiny nuances of proper British behavior - when to use surnames, for example. Recognizing that I'm not the ideal reader for this novel, I bow out. 

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