Barbara Pym EXCELLENT WOMEN Folio Society
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Barbara Pym EXCELLENT WOMEN Folio Society
Folio edition, first print slipcased hardback of EXCELLENT WOMEN, by Barbara Pym and Published by the Folio Society, London, in 2005. Introduced by A.N. Wilson. Illustrated by Debra McFarlane. First published in 1952.
The book is in very good condition (Half colour illustrations on pink cloth boards and red lettering on spine). In its original brown slipcase which is in very good condition with only minor shelf wear. Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no inscriptions.
English novelist Barbara Pym was born in 1913 in Shropshire. She was educated at Oxford and for many years worked at the African Institute in London. She enjoyed initial success in her writing career but then for over a decade was unable to find a publisher for her novels. After being called the most underrated writer of the century by Philip Larkin, there was a resurgence of critical and popular interest in her work in the final years of her life.
She published six novels between 1950 and 1961, including Excellent Women in 1952, and four additional works after 1977. Among these later works is Quartet in Autumn, which was nominated for the Booker Prize. Pym died in 1980 at her home in Oxfordshire.
"Excellent Women is one of Barbara Pyms richest and most amusing high comedies. Mildred Lathbury is a clergymans daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those excellent women, the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted.
As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighborsanthropologist Helena Napier and her 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."
'[One of] the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years.' - Lord David Cecil
'A startling reminder that solitude may be chosen and that a lively, full novel can be constructed entirely within the precincts of that regressive virtue, feminine patience.' - John Updike, The New Yorker
'Reading Barbara Pym is . . . a wonderful experience, full of unduplicable perceptions, sensations, and soul-stirrings.' - Newsweek
206 pages with a frontis and 7 colour illustrations.
ISBN: n/a
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Barbara Pym EXCELLENT WOMEN Folio Society