Mildred Lathbury, “an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties,” enjoys the ordinary routines of her days, months, years (5). She works part-time at an organisation that helps “impoverished gentlewomen”; she is involved in her local church and is close friends with the vicar, Father Malory, and his sister Winifred; she has a friend from her school days who she sometimes goes on holiday with, and whose brother she lunches with once a year (12). Her parents are both dead; her father, when he was alive, was a clergyman, and they lived in a country rectory, though now Mildred lives in a “shabby part of London” (7). Mildred is plain and knows it, and doesn’t have any great romantic dreams: she’s self-sufficient, one of the “excellent women” of the title who, being unmarried, ends up taking care of herself and those around her, too.
A pair of seemingly small things combine to disrupt Mildred’s routines: a new couple moves in to the flat below hers; a new woman joins the parish and moves into the empty flat in the vicarage. The new couple, Helena and Rocky Napier, are worldly and sophisticated in comparison to Mildred: Rocky, handsome and charming, has just come back from naval service in Italy (the book is set just after WWII), and Helena is an anthropologist who lacks skill and inclination when it comes to cooking, cleaning, and other domestic duties. (This somewhat shocks poor Mildred, whose reaction is to think, “Surely wives shouldn’t be too busy to cook for their husbands? (9)) Soon Mildred finds herself drinking wine with her new neighbors, socializing with Rocky while his wife is off doing her academic work, and even going to the Learned Society to hear Helena and her work partner, Everard Bone, present their research. And the new woman who lives in the vicarage, Allegra Gray, shakes things up just as much, as the vicar soon falls for her and proposes marriage, breaking up the comfortable companionship of Julian, Winifred, and Mildred.
I like the setting of this book, all the period details: the war is over but its evidence is still everywhere: when one character is painting a room and it’s not going so well, he notes that the paint tin says it’s meant to be mixed to the consistency of cream; someone else comments that it’s hard to remember what cream was like. The church that Mildred goes to for occasional lunchtime services, near where she worked, was bombed, and half the building is rubble; one aisle was undamaged so services continue in that side. And I like Mildred’s narrative voice: she’s observant, though she’s naive, and she’s quite funny sometimes, for all that she’s nice and good and helpful: she loses patience with everyone expecting her to help them out and be the solid and dependable one, but she is solid and dependable and can’t really be otherwise, or doesn’t really want to be. “Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing,” she notes at one point (44). That sort of gentle humor is one of the defining characteristics of this book, and one of the main things that makes it so pleasant to read. The domestic dramas of the book feel a bit dated (Helena and Rocky’s squabbles, the drama around the vicar’s engagement), as does the question of what kind of lives unmarried women might have: but that doesn’t make the book any less worthwhile.
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