Barbara Pym's Excellent Women and the "novel of education"

The narrator of Barbara Pym's 1952 novel, Excellent Women, appears at first glance as almost a parody or mockery of the English literary spinster type: She's in her late 30s, living in a small "flat" in a house on the "wrong" side of Victoria Station, sharing the bathroom w/ the 2 other tenants, working for some sort of dowdy English charity, daughter of a clergyman, devout herself - regular church-goer ar the "right" Anglican church in the neighborhood, closest friends are the rector and his 40-year-old sister, neither of them married. She is self-described as "plain," and, w/ a touch of literary wit, notes that she is not a Jane Eyre type (the type who gives hope to other plain women - reader, I married him). For all that she's upbeat, slyly self-deprecatory, and a touch ironic - as in her dinner with her two friends and joins them in speculation on who gave an anonymous donation to the church for window repair (like, who care?). Will anything at all of import happen in this novel? Well, yes, because, following one of the literary formulae, a stranger has come to town - there's a new tenant in the flat downstairs, a woman who's got a glamorous career (she's an anthropologist), a husband in the Navy, and, seemingly, a lover on the side - and brash manner about her - one of these two women will influence the other, and the question is which will change, and will they both survive their close kinship (much discussion about the shared bathroom, and who will clean it and how effectively, and what brand of toilet paper to buy). It sells this novel short to call it domestic or trivial, in that it's also a powerful portrayal of an England still rattled and suffering shortages after the war, and of the plight of women in England - still, in 1952, if unmarried so hard to find decent employment, to be taken seriously, to find a role in life outside of church and charity. The title gives us a hint - we expect the narrator to grow and mature; she may not be a Jane Eyre, but this may also be a bildungsroman (novel of education) of a different sort. 


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