Mildred, a single woman in her 30s, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, is one of the genteel and respectable 'excellent women' people rely on to live on the sidelines, coming forward only long enough to make tea in a crisis. When ...

Middle-aged Jane is the well-intentioned but far from perfect clergyman's wife and mother. Prudence, who at 29 is teetering at the edge of spinsterhood, is an attractive, educated working girl. The two best friends share memories of t...

An Unsuitable Attachment is set in a parish outside of London. There the novel's 'unattached' characters work out a confusing web of matchmaking and forming attachments. A new eligible bachelor in the neighborhood, Rupert Stonebird...

Aging and fastidious, Leonora bypasses her suitor, a widowed antiques dealer, in favor of James, his twenty-four-year-old nephew, and is challenged by an impassioned woman named Phoebe and Ned, an American with a sexual hold on the ma...

Barbara Pym is a master at capturing the subtle mayhem that takes place in the apparent quiet of the English countryside. Fifty-something sisters Harriet and Belinda Bede live a comfortable, settled existence. Belinda, the quieter of ...