Less Than Angels, by Barbara Pym

The first person we meet in this story is Catherine Oliphant, "brooding over her pot of tea" and watching people around her settle down with trays of food. She is a writer, of "stories and articles for women's magazines and had to draw her inspiration from everyday life..."  We learn that "Tom, her present love," is in Africa, studying a native tribe. In the crowds passing outside, Catherine sees two of his colleagues, senior anthropologists. The story then shifts to follow them to a gathering at a new anthropological library and research centre. The funds for it have been coaxed out of the recently-widowed Minnie Foresight by the retired but still active Professor Felix Mainwaring. Students are already making use of the library, and rather than shooing them out, the manager Miss Clovis reluctantly invites them to join the meeting. Among them is Deirdre Swan, a first year student; and two older students, Digby and Mark, hoping to win grants to do field work.

Digby and Mark are friends of Catherine's through Tom Mallow, who lives with her when he isn't in Africa. The story moves between Catherine, in her comfortable little flat "on the shabby side of Regent's Park," the students and staff at the centre, and Deirdre's family. She lives with her mother and her unmarried Aunt Rhoda, and her brother Malcolm. Their house is next door to a church, where the older women have become devout members of the rather High congregation. Like Catherine, both are keen observers of their neighbors, particularly Alaric Lydgate, who has just moved in next door. He too is an anthropologist, retired from the field, with boxes of notes that he has never managed to write up into articles. His sister Gertrude, herself an anthropologist, shares a flat with Esther Clovis and is often at the centre.

The first chapters introduce us to this large cast of characters, establishing their connections and relations. Then one morning Tom Mallow walks into the centre. He has returned after two years in Africa. Finding no one he knows at the centre, he introduces himself to Deirdre, takes her out for a drink, and is soon meeting her regularly. He invites her to a party at Catherine's flat, where she is shocked to learn that he lives with Catherine. But it doesn't stop her from meeting him. Eventually Catherine sees them together - at a restaurant across the street from her flat, where she often eats with Tom herself - and things come to a head. Tom however escapes much of the reaction by returning to Africa, leaving both Catherine and Deirdre to deal with his absence.

At the moment of crisis, after seeing Tom with Deirdre, Catherine thinks "I'm not one of those excellent women, who can just go home and eat a boiled egg and make a cup of tea and be very splendid..."  But I thought she was a wonderful character, and I deeply wanted to smack Tom's face for treating her so badly. There is such life in her. I liked her determination to deal with the situation with Tom. She doesn't wallow, she just gets on with things. She is unconventional, not just in living with Tom outside marriage (which I found rather surprising in a novel from 1955). She asks questions, she is interested in people, and she often says whatever comes into her mind. She also seems to have a gift for friendship - and perhaps the need for it. To the astonishment of the Swans, she barges into Alaric Lydgate's life, and she even manages to work out a friendly relationship with Deirdre.

I also enjoyed the familiar Pymian elements to this story, particularly the squabbles among the anthropologists, competing for funds and recognition. Professor Mainwaring plumes himself on the grants that Minnie Foresight will provide to deserving students, but his pride is destined for a spectacular fall. He is a great trial to Esther Clovis, as she tries to manage the centre. Few people know why she left her previous position as secretary to a Learned Society.

...it had something to do with the making of tea. Not that the making of tea can ever really be regarded as a petty or trivial matter, and Miss Clovis did seem to have been seriously as fault. Hot water from the tap had been used, the kettle had not been quite boiling, the teapot had not been warmed . . . whatever the details, there had been words, during the course of which other things had come out, things of a darker nature. Voices had been raised and in the end Miss Clovis had felt bound to hand in her resignation.

I am still wondering about those "things of a darker nature..." Perhaps she was skimming off the tea funds.

The front cover of my Plume edition of this book has a quote from the Chicago Tribune: "One of Pym's sleekest and funniest novels." I thought the words of the Kirkus Reviews on the back a better fit: "Ironic, shrewd, a bit sad...especially diverting."  I did find this story rather sad, both in Catherine's situation, and in something that happens to another character - quite suddenly, and with no warning.

Since anthropologists play a major role in this book, I was not surprised to find references to Helena Napier and her husband (Rocky), and Everard Bone and his wife Mildred. Miss Clovis considers Mildred "a rather dull woman," which proves she isn't all that bright herself, but at least she admits that Mildred is "a great help to him in his work" out in the field. I will add this to my list of cross-over characters. I would quite like to meet Catherine in another story, or at least to find out where her story takes her.

Tracking a cast of characters

An Unsuitable Attachment, Barbara Pym

I didn't enjoy this late novel of Barbara Pym's as much as the others I have read.  It has two familiar settings, the north London parish of St. Basil, where Mark Ainger is the vicar; and a small specialized library where Ianthe Broome, one of his parishioners, works.  In a switch, at least from the other Pym novels that I have read, it includes a trip to Rome with most of the main characters.  There are seven of these, starting with Mark's wife Sophia.  Really, I think I'd have to include their cat Faustina on the list as well.  She is a source of tension in the vicarage and even with some of the parishioners.

Overall, the story felt a bit diffuse to me, switching constantly between so many different characters and points of view.  The ending seemed even more ambiguous than usual.  I am not sure that the attachment of the title is really that unsuitable.  There is a five-year difference in age, on the woman's side, which doesn't seem like a big gap to me, but may have read differently when this story was originally written.  On the other hand, I felt like I didn't know the male part of the attachment all that well; we just aren't given enough information about him, to judge his suitability.

I saw from a brief forward that this book was published after Barbara Pym's death.  Her literary executor Hazel Holt edited the manuscript for publication.  Ms. Holt wrote that the edits included cuts made according to discussions  Pym had with her about the manuscript over the years.  She made other cuts in sections that "have dated in ways [Pym] would have found unacceptable..."  In looking over the other Pym novels that I still have unread, I discovered that three are also posthumous publications: A Few Green Leaves, Crampton Hodnet, and An Academic Question.  A note at the start of An Academic Question states that Ms. Holt combined two manuscript versions to produce the published work. I find the question of posthumous publication a bit troubling.  How can we be sure what the author would have wanted?  Shouldn't it be clear what is the author's work, and what her editor's?  I don't believe that Jane Austen would have published the versions of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion that her brother Henry did, though I am glad to have them.  I am looking forward with some trepidation to two posthumous novels by favorite authors, Elizabeth Peters and Terry Pratchett.

I found the multitude of characters in this book bewildering enough that I made a cast list.  Then when one, Rupert Stonebird, hosts a dinner party about half-way through, I knew I had met one of his guests before, in an earlier book - I just couldn't remember which one.  I went looking for a list or chart of the characters that appear across different books, but the only resource I found was an academic article that I can't access.  At least from the abstract I was able to identify the guest, Everard Bone, whom I first met in Excellent Women.  So I decided to start my own, non-spoilery version, because I can't resist that kind of literary puzzle, and honestly, trying to remember from book to book will drive me batty.  If the information is easily available elsewhere, please let me know in the comments or in an email (maylisa66@earthlink.net).  Please also feel free to add information on other characters not listed below - without major spoilers if possible.  I will update this list and also post it in the "Pages" section.  It's not a long list so far, because I haven't read all of her books yet.

Everard Bone: character in Excellent Women; appears in An Unsuitable Attachment

Julian Malory: character in Excellent Women; appears in A Glass of Blessings

Winifred Malory: character in Excellent Women; appears in A Glass of Blessings

Mildred Latham: central character in Excellent Women; mentioned in An Unsuitable Attachment; brief appearance in Jane and Prudence

Prudence Bates: central character in Jane and Prudence; mentioned in A Glass of Blessings

Rocky Napier: character in Excellent Women; mentioned in A Glass of Blessings

Wilf Bason: character in A Glass of Blessings; mentioned in An Unsuitable Attachment

Wilmet Forsyth: central character in A Glass of Blessings; cameo (with husband Rodney & friends) in Jane & Prudence

A woman with too much time on her hands

A Glass of Blessings, Barbara Pym

All the while I was reading this book, I was wishing that I could give the central character, Wilmet Forsyth, a copy of the last book I read, Marjorie Hillis's Live Alone and Like It.  Not because Wilmet is single or lives alone, but because she has no plan for living, she just drifts through her days with few interests or responsibilities.  She and her husband Rodney have no children, though I couldn't figure out if that was by choice or not.  Because she has so much time on her hands, and I think feels the lack of something she can't quite define, she plays around at love, flirting with her best friend's husband and brother in turn.  She begins to take one of these relationships more seriously, building it up in her mind to a real love, but it ends badly for her (in a way that surprised me nearly as much as Wilmet**). By the end she seems to have learned something, at least to know herself a little better, and that seems a happy ending.  Her story reminded me a little of Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse, who also makes some big mistakes about love and marriage, and about herself, though she gets a much more obviously happy ending.

I won't say much about the story, because I'm sure many people have already read this one, and those who haven't should have the fun of discovering its twists and turns for themselves.  I'll just mention a couple of things that struck me with this book.  I wondered from the start about Wilmet's name, which I have never come across before.  I was happy to learn that she is named for a character in Charlotte M. Yonge's novels, though she doesn't say which one.  A later reference to Barchester Towers reminded me that Barbara Pym was also a fan of Anthony Trollope, who with Yonge is mentioned in others of her books.

Wilmet and Rodney live with his widowed mother Sybil, in her home.  We aren't given the backstory, whether it's for economic reasons or family ties (Wilmet apparently has no family).  It certainly isn't because Sybil needs care.  I think one reason that Wilmet is a bit adrift is that Sybil does so much, apparently handling all of the household tasks.  She is also very involved in settlement work, inviting Wilmet along to help.  Unlike Wilmet, who is an active member of her parish, she is an agnostic - I think the first I have met in Barbara Pym's books.  She is quite open about her beliefs and willing to debate.  She seems to have influenced Rodney, who will drive his wife to church but rarely attends services.  I really enjoyed Sybil's sometimes sharp comments and observations, as well as the way she makes her own life.  I think she sees more than Wilmet realizes but isn't sure how to help her.**

I had actually met Wilmet already, as she makes a cameo appearance in No Fond Return of Love.  I have gotten used to Pym's characters crossing from book to book, but I was still surprised to meet so many in this book.  Both Wilmet and her friend Rowena were once infatuated with Rocky Napier from Excellent Women, whom they met in Italy during the war.  Julian and Winifred Malory from Excellent Women also appear, and one character ends up living with them for a short time.  Prudence Bates from Jane and Prudence plays an important part in this story, though she herself remains off-stage.  And Rodney's colleague James Cash seemed familiar, though I haven't figured out if he and his wife Hilary are in another book.

**The next sections contain some spoilers.

Wilmet builds up in her mind a love affair with Piers Longridge, the brother of her friend Rowena.  I figured out there was some kind of mystery about his living situation, but like Wilmet I was surprised to discover that he is gay, living with a partner, Keith (both of whom show up with Wilmet and Rodney in No Fond Return of Love).  Not that anyone ever says it out loud - but everyone pretty much accepts it.  I didn't expect that in a book published in 1958 - either the characters or the acceptance.

Wilmet and Rodney receive an even greater shock when Sybil announces first that she will marry her old friend, Professor Arnold Root; and second, that she expects them to move out when Arnold moves in.  She hardly seems to notice that she is upending their lives. I want to think that she is doing it at least in part for their own good.  And I believe it will be good for them, to be on their own, building their own home and a different kind of life together.

An unusual cure for a broken heart

No Fond Return of Love, Barbara Pym

There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual.

This was an unsettling reading experience for me, in a good way.  I had only a vague idea of the story when I started, and it kept taking turns that I didn't expect.  The ending took me by surprise, both with the events of the last chapters and the rather inconclusive conclusion.  I think I know what happened, but I'm not sure - nor am I sure that what might seem like "happily-ever-after" endings will actually turn out that way, for more than one of the characters.  I'm still mulling over that, and working out different scenarios in my mind.

In case I'm not the last to read this, there may be minor spoilers below.

The story opens at a conference for people who work in editing, of journals and scholarly books.  Dulcie Mainwaring is there partly to distract herself from a broken engagement.  "[It] seemed to be just the kind of thing that was recommended for women in her position - an opportunity to meet new people and to amuse herself by observing the lives of others . . ."  The first new person that she meets is Viola Dace (née Violet), who hints to Dulcie that she is there mainly because of Aylwin Forbes, one of the speakers.  "He and I were once...." she says.  Dulcie doesn't press her for details, but she can't help noticing how very handsome Aylwin is.  By the end of the conference, she's rather taken with him herself.

Dulcie lives in west London, in a large house she inherited from her parents.  She does free-lance work, researching and indexing, but she must have money of her own, because she doesn't seem to work much.  As soon as she gets back from the conference, she throws herself into a research project of her own: Aylwin Forbes.  She spends much of the book first investigating him and his family, including the wife from whom he is separated, and then stalking them all over London. When Viola moves into a room in Dulcie's house, she joins Dulcie on her expeditions, including visits to the church where Aylwin's brother is the vicar, and the small town in Somerset where his mother owns a hotel.

I liked Dulcie from the start.  She reminded me of Jane, in Jane and Prudence, both kind people, rather at loose ends, without enough to do, and lonely.  Dulcie finds it "so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of other people - to observe their joys and sorrows with detachment as if one were watching a film or a play."  She makes some tentative attempts to reach out, to move out of that safe detachment, with Viola, and with her niece Laurel, who comes to live with her while enrolling in secretarial school.  Both maintain their own detachment.  I was uncomfortable watching Dulcie's growing obsession with Aylwin, and even a little embarrassed at how far she would go, mixed with dread of her getting caught.  I kept wishing she could make a real friend, or find a different interest.  Though I was impressed with her research skills, Aylwin hardly seems worth all that effort.

While Dulcie is pursuing her research, the story briefly shifts to follow other characters, including Aylwin himself, as well as Viola and Laurel.  But their stories are all intertwined, and in the end, Barbara Pym brings them together.  It felt like the jumbled pieces of a puzzle each fitting neatly into place, or the way Dorothy L. Sayers describes the bells of Fenchurch St Paul coming to their places at the end of a complicated peal.  I'd like to know more about how those different stories turned out, particularly Dulcie's.

Of course, I may find out in other books.  Barbara Pym seems to enjoy having her characters make cameo appearances in other people's stories.  This one features characters from A Glass of Blessings, which I still haven't read.  I was also amused to see Some Tame Gazelle among the books that Dulcie keeps in her bathroom, "their covers now faded and buckled by steam."  I did note that both she and Aylwin grew up reading odd volumes of Every Woman's Encyclopedia ("circa 1911").

Dulcie's daily cleaner, Miss Lord, tells her, "You read too much, that's your trouble."  Men don't like it, she says. "'No, I don't think they do,' said Dulcie, but absently, as the world of the book began to seem the real one."  I very much enjoyed my time in her world.

Jane & Prudence

Jane and Prudence, Barbara Pym

This novel, published in 1953, combines two of Barbara Pym's familiar settings.  The title characters met at Oxford, where Jane was Prudence's tutor.  Despite the twelve-year gap in their ages, they became and remain friends.  As the book opens, they are attending a Reunion of Old Students at the college (a setting that instantly evoked Gaudy Night for me).  Their lives have taken different paths since those college days.  Jane is married, with a daughter about to go up to Oxford in her turn.  Her husband is a vicar, and they are preparing to move from their suburban parish to one in a small country town.  Prudence on the other hand lives in London, in an elegant flat with Regency-style furniture.  She has fallen in and out of love many times over the years - Jane thinks that her affairs "were surely as much an occupation as anything else."  The current object of her devotion is her married boss, Dr. Grampian, who writes learned books (about economics or history; we are never told which exactly).  Prudence is part of the office staff who assist in the research and publication of his books, though like the office in Quartet in Autumn, it is never clear what anyone actually does there.

The story moves back and forth between Jane in the country and Prudence in the city, and the occasional visits they exchange.  Jane is settling into the new parish, where she doesn't quite fit.  She is warm-hearted and friendly, interested in people and sympathetic.  But she is an unconventional vicar's wife: a poor housekeeper, badly dressed, uninterested in parish work, given to saying whatever crosses her mind without considering her audience, and confusing people with random lines of poetry.  I liked Jane very much, and it was painful to watch her flounder around, sticking her foot in her mouth, irritating even her long-suffering husband.  It's especially endearing that she recognizes and humbly admits her own failings, though perhaps basing her ideas of a vicar's wife on the novels of Anthony Trollope and Charlotte M. Yonge set her up for disappointment from the start.

Jane is also determined to find Prudence a husband. Her first choice is a youngish man in the village, Fabian Driver, playing up his role as a widower after neglecting his wife while she was alive and carrying on affairs in London.  I would have considered that a major red flag, but he is single and comfortably well off, which seems enough for Jane.  She invites Prudence down for a visit, the two meet, and Prudence begins seeing Fabian both in London and the village.  She transfers her affections from Dr. Grampian to Fabian, but they seem hardly any warmer, let alone the basis for a real relationship.  Both Prudence and Fabian seem to be following a script for romance, leading to suitable marriage, though in the end they aren't reading from the same one.  Prudence at 29 feels the pressure of social expectations, that women should marry and have children, set against her quiet flat and her independent life in the city.  But then her work is not particularly interesting, particularly after she falls out of love with Dr. Grampian.  I enjoyed the sections set in the offices, where Prudence feels herself rather superior to her co-workers, with their quiet gossip and constant clock-watching. She also feels herself in competition for Dr. Grampian's attention, particularly with the sole male on the staff, Geoffrey Manifold, a young man of her own age.

In the end, Prudence's story is left unresolved, in what I am coming to think a typical Pymian ending.  However, we do learn the coda to an earlier story, with its own ambiguous ending, that of Mildred Lathbury in Excellent Women.  I was disappointed that we didn't get a cameo from Mildred herself, my favorite so far of Pym's characters; we only learn her news second-hand, through something Jane hears.  It did make me wonder, though, if we might hear of Prudence especially in a later story.  I'd like to think that Jane just continues on her own happily idiosyncratic way, malaprops and all.  Instead of Trollope and Yonge, though, perhaps she should have read Dorothy L. Sayers' books, with their excellent vicars' wives, especially Mrs. Venables from The Nine Tailors.  I do love characters who are readers.  Prudence, whose last name is Bates, disavows any likeness to the Bates mother and daughter in Emma, though she seems to prefer modern novels, "well written and tortuous, with a good dash of culture and the inevitable unhappy or indefinite ending, which was so like life."  I wonder whose books Barbara Pym had in mind when she wrote that!

I still have several of her books to read, but I don't want to rush through them, and I feel that I don't want to read too many at once, unlike say Angela Thirkell.  Reading one Thirkell (or even someone else's review of Thirkell) always makes me want to pick up the next in the series.  Perhaps that's because they are a series, though, unlike Pym's stand-alone novels.  Speaking of Thirkell, I read a Moyer Bell edition of this novel, and I did not notice a single misprint or error, unlike those that plague their awful editions of Thirkell's novels, which proves they did have a copy-editor at one time.

Four lives in London

Quartet in Autumn, Barbara Pym

When I found a copy of this at Half Price Books last week, I decided it would be my first choice for the Barbara Pym Reading Week.  As I've mentioned before, I read some of Pym's books many years ago.  I enjoyed them, but they made no lasting impression on me, and I can't even remember now which ones I read.  Once I started blogging, I found such enthusiastic readers that I knew I had to try her books again.  I began with Excellent Women, which left me eager to read more. 

Quartet in Autumn was not what I expected in a "Barbara Pym novel."  I had no idea that any of her books included the phrase "F*ck off," even spoken by a passing unnamed character.  That made me realize that though I've read so little of her work, I've unconsciously type-cast her books: quietly ironic social comedies of spinsters, curates, tea, frustrated romances.  Actually, this book has all of those, but in a very different kind of story.  It is set in London in the 1970s, with immigrants swelling the population amid economic uncertainties.  The quartet of the title are two men, Norman and Edwin, and two women, Marcia and Letty.  All four are in their sixties, coming up on retirement after working together in an office for years.  We learn almost nothing about their work, what they do during office hours, other than talk.  Though circumspect, never sharing too much information, they know each other's situations.  Yet though each is single, and on his or her own (despite Edwin's married daughter and grandchildren), they don't meet outside of the office, even at lunch.  All go their own way, and the story follows them each in turn.  Looking back, it seems to me that we learn almost as little about Norman's life outside the office as his work inside, other than his constant worry about inflation and his fondness for butter beans.  Edwin's life is the Church, and he follows the liturgical year through the High Church parishes that he visits in turn.  Marcia has recently had a serious operation, and it is clear that she is not completely well, physically or mentally.  Her neighbors have noticed some odd behavior, though Janice, the social worker who visits regularly, never seems to notice that Marcia simply stonewalls her (Janice's inexperience is matched only by her self-complacency). 

Of the four, the two women are the closest to retirement.  While Marcia owns her small house, Letty plans to share her old friend Marjorie's cottage in the country.  But when Marjorie's situation changes, Letty loses that comfortable future and must make new plans.  She has already lost one home, when a Nigeran immigrant buys the house where she has rented a room for many years.  Though Letty has some concerns about living among Africans and immigrants, which her office-mates share, it is her new landlord's congregation, meeting in his flat and singing exuberant hymns, which finally drives her to move.

Barbara Pym does something wonderful with these quiet lives.  I agree with the cover blurb from The Financial Times about her "Extraordinarily delicate irony, fine writing, understated humour, and some bleak perceptions about the human condition."  I am still thinking about her people, wondering what happened to them, how their stories turned out.  Anbolyn has also written about Quartet in Autumn, and now I'm off to read her review, and see what other people are reading for the week - and maybe find my next book.

Rediscovering Barbara Pym

Excellent Women, Barbara Pym

Many years ago I read several of Barbara Pym's novels - at this point I couldn't even tell you which ones. What I do remember is that I thought them clever but superficial, a little dreary, and in the end not really the kind of books that I wanted to read. Lately though I've been seeing posts about her books, like Anbolyn's on Gudrun's Tights, which made me think it was time to try them again. Perhaps I had been too quick to dismiss them, or maybe I would read them very differently all these years later. When I found copies of Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings at Half Price Books, it seemed like book fate.

The first time I started Excellent Women, I didn't take to it immediately, in fact I set it aside and went on to read other things. But when I came back to it, this time I was very quickly caught up in the story of Mildred Lathbury, one of the excellent women of the title and its narrator. She lives by herself in a flat in a quiet part of London, where she moved after the death of her parents. A clergyman's daughter, she is used to coping with the events of life, large and small. With a comfortable income, she does not need to work, but she has a part-time job with an organization that helps distressed gentlewomen. She gives much of her spare time to her parish, St Mary's, where she is friends with the vicar Julian Malory and his sister Winifred, who keeps house for him.

As the story opens, it is shortly after the end of the Second World War, and new neighbors are moving into the flat below Mildred's. She meets first Helena Napier, whose husband Rockingham is still in the Navy. Helena announces that she is an anthropologist, at work on an important project. She is not even there the night that Rockingham Napier arrives at their flat, and it is Mildred who welcomes him to his new home. With Helena caught up in her work, and in her colleague Everard Bone, her husband, handsome and charming, makes Mildred his confidant, turning to her for tea and sympathy. In time both Helena and Everard do as well. The arrival of the Napiers disrupts her quiet life, with its familiar rounds of work and church, evenings with the Malorys and church festivals, in ways sometimes exciting, sometimes troubling.

I found Mildred an interesting and sympathetic character, in part of course because she is telling her story. She gives us not just the events, but her own thoughts and feelings, even the negative ones. She has made herself a comfortable life on her own terms, and if it isn't precisely her ideal life, she doesn't spend a lot of time repining. She would like to be married, but she isn't willing to marry just for the sake of marriage, and she seems to see clearly the faults and foibles of the various men she meets, though she is equally honest about her own. She has more patience than I would in listening to people talk about themselves and in making them cups of tea or little meals - and she really listens, with interest and sympathy, which is rarer than people realize. Like most good listeners, however, she sometimes has a hard time making herself heard.

I've often seen Barbara Pym compared to Jane Austen, and I can certainly see why with this book. Though it is set in London, it is really about a small community within the city, centered in the neighborhood and around the parish. There are the different levels of their society, which can meet over decorating the church or a jumble sale, but not mix. There are the disruptions to that community that come with new arrivals, like an alluring widow who moves into a flat in the vicarage, and there is the communal interest in news, particularly in matrimonial prospects. Unlike Austen's heroines, of course, Mildred lives on her own and has a job, even if it is only part-time. She used to share the flat with a friend, who has recently moved out to take a job teaching, and she very much enjoys her freedom and her space - something I understand very well! Again unlike Jane Austen, Pym gives us a rather ambiguous ending. I think she is suggesting that Mildred may indeed marry, though with the two prospects she has in view, I would still vote for the quiet flat on my own. I was left wanting to know more, what happened next. But if I can't have more of Mildred's story, I have Barbara Pym's other books to look forward to.