Excellent Women Audiobook

Quotes

• “[One of] the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years.”

  — Lord David Cecil, New York Times bestselling author

• “[Pym] is a shrewd observer of a certain kind of middle-class woman, no longer young and not quite beautiful, whom society finds it easy to overlook. And she is just as shrewd an observer of the people that these women, vigilant and perceptive, themselves observe….[in] Excellent Women, Pym’s most famous and most perfect novel.”

  — New York Times

• “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.”

  — New Yorker

• “Pym brings Lathbury into sharp focus, and we come away with a great sympathy and affection for her. Are you interested, as I am, in the complicated emotional dynamics of a small town church jumble sale? It’s Barbara Pym to the rescue.”

  — Literary Hub

• “Her most widely admired work…Cleanly crafted…A special treat for lovers of the high, wry style.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

• “The fabulous Barbara Pym…is as witty and observant as Jane Austen and is very acute on male vanity.”

  — Paula Byrne, author of Kick

• “What stays longest with the reader once the amusement, the satire, the alert ear, and exact eye have all been acknowledged? Partly it is the underlying loneliness of life…the absence of self-pity, the scrupulousness of one’s relations with others.”

  — Philip Larkin, English poet and novelist