Excellent Women Audiobook By Barbara Pym cover art

Excellent Women

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Excellent Women

By: Barbara Pym
Narrated by: Jayne Entwistle
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Excellent Women is one of Barbara Pym's richest and most amusing high comedies. This is Barbara Pym's world at its funniest.

Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those excellent women - the smart, supportive, repressed women whom men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors - anthropologist Helena Napier; Helen's handsome, dashing husband, Rocky; and Julian Malory, the vicar next door - the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.

©2016 Barbara Pym (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Funny Witty Middle Ages
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Barbara Pym is a writer with a very special worldview and a distinctive sense of humor. Jayne Entwistle as narrator proves to be a perfect match. I recommend this recording both to those who already know and love Pym and to those discovering her for the first time (as long as they realize that the charms on offer here are of the most delicate variety -- BP is not for those who want a lot of upheavals in their plots!).

sublime!

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This was my introduction to Pym. She perfectly captures a young (30) single woman’s life, daughter of a clergyman, in a narrow slice of postwar London. The audio of this book was slightly tedious at times & the rendition of male voices by the female narrator was rather grating. But the writing & the perspective were spot on. A gem of a story.

Perfect snapshot of a woman in time

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Meh. I got what I paid for. Glad it was on sale. Reader was good. Characters were quaint and petty.

Gossip that rambled aimlessly without plot.

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Would you consider the audio edition of Excellent Women to be better than the print version?

Reading is always a pleasure but I have read it at least 4 times. Listening (twice) was glorious as well.

What does Jayne Entwistle bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

She does voices quite nicely. Perhaps not how I'd imagined but nice enough.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

"The Dominion of the Birds, I very much fear it's come to that!"

Any additional comments?

I wish all her books were available to be listened to.

As much a pleasure as reading the book

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Enjoyed the story and the different characters displayed by the narrator. Good humor and description of the women and men in this book. I became attached to the characters and their personality.

Nice book

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Barbara Pym is very funny, although in a very dry way as if she were completely unaware of her humor. One of the men who is tangentially involved with her heroine, Mildred Lathbury, for instance, is named Everard Bone, and he tries to get Mildred to come to his apartment and roast his meat. This seems flagrantly obscene to me, but Pym is always completely straight-faced , as if any improper thoughts in this direction never crossed her mind.




An Excellent Novel

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If you could sum up Excellent Women in three words, what would they be?

Funny, touching, smart.

What about Jayne Entwistle’s performance did you like?

Jayne Entwistle did an excellent job. Her voice was well suited to the book and she did a super job of distinguishing the characters by tone and accent.

Any additional comments?

I have read this book many times and listened to it as well in the old days when it was available on audio cassette. I was always hopeful that Audible would obtain the several titles written by Barbara Pym and I hope they soon add more. At least "Quartet in Autumn" and "Less than Angels" and "Some Tame Gazelle".

At last a Barbara Pym

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If you know Barbara Pym, you will know that she writes about the lives of upstanding modest churchgoing women in postwar England to whom nothing very much happens. Within that understood framework, this book is exemplary, and the narration was perfect. I'd like to see more Pym on Audible.
This is not a book for those looking for action, romance or high drama, but it is written with an economy and sensitivity worthy of Jane Austen.

A special taste

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This was a strange read, it's a lot to do about nothing. It was just a step into the everyday lives of a group of people that are connected by geography. I almost quit reading it several times but curiosity about the characters pulled me back in. A clean cozy with good narration.

Meh...

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What a dreadful tale is told! Did those in Pym's contemporary readership see the tragedy written large in Mildred's life?

Pym has written a cautionary tale for spinsters of any period.

Not a cozy little book

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