Excellent Women

I suppose an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people’s business, and if she is also a clergyman’s daughter then one might really say that there is no hope for her.

Excellent Women is mostly about drinking tea, but it's also about a single woman in her 30's getting involved in her new neighbors' marital problems and the love life of her pastor, all while well-intentioned friends alternate between relentlessly trying to marry her off and expecting her to help with anything they need (since, you know, she's single and so has nothing better to do). It's absolutely delightful. The story is quiet and charming, if not especially plot-driven, and Pym’s observations are insightful and witty. When combined with the excellent characterization, it feels a bit like if Jane Austen had written about a 30-something spinster who resigned herself to never marrying and was instead involved in everyone else’s business.

However, funny as it often is, a deep sense of melancholy pervades the novel. Mildred isn’t unhappy living alone (or so she says, and I think I’m inclined to believe her), but there are times when she is undeniably lonely: washing her sad underwear, considering her solitary dinner, watching married couples, quietly wishing that someone would take an interest in her.

I will certainly be reading more Pym in the future.

Some favorite passages:

She was fair-haired and pretty, gaily dressed in corduroy trousers and a bright jersey, while I, mousy and rather plain anyway, drew attention to these qualities with my shapeless overall and old fawn skirt.

Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person, nor have I ever thought of myself as being like her.

I felt that I was now old enough to become fussy and spinsterish if I wanted to.

As I moved about the kitchen getting out china and cutlery, I thought, not for the first time, how pleasant it was to be living alone.

No answer seemed to be needed or expected to this question, and we laughed together, a couple of women against the whole race of men.

‘Of course,’ Mrs. Napier went on, ‘when you’re first in love, everything about the other person seems delightful, especially if it shows the difference between you.

‘Of course you’ve never been married,’ she said, putting me in my place among the rows of excellent women.

I explained that I had just finished supper and added that I found it rather a bother cooking just for myself. ‘I like food,’ I said, ‘but I suppose on the whole women don’t make such a business of living as men do.’ I thought of my half-used tin of baked beans; no doubt I should be seeing that again tomorrow.

I could see very well what she meant, for unmarried women with no ties could very well become unwanted. I should feel it even more than Winifred, for who was there really to grieve for me when I was gone? Dora, the Malorys, one or two people in my old village might be sorry,

but I was not really first in anybody’s life. I could so very easily be replaced. . . .

for she was of a romantic, melancholy nature, apt to imagine herself in situations.

‘You know Mildred would never do anything wrong or foolish.’ I reflected a little sadly that this was only too true and hoped I did not appear too much that kind of person to others. Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.

But I have never been very much given to falling in love and have often felt sorry that I have so far missed not only the experience of marriage, but the perhaps even greater and more ennobling one of having loved and lost.

I did not then know to the extent I do now that practically anything may be the business of an unattached woman with no troubles of her own, who takes a kindly interest in those of her friends.

‘Oh, no, I don’t think he saw me, or if he did he didn’t recognise me. People don’t, you know. I suppose there’s really nothing outstanding about me.’

‘But my dear Mildred, you musn’t marry,’ he was saying indignantly. ‘Life is disturbing enough as it is without these alarming suggestions. I always think of you as being so very balanced and sensible, such an excellent woman. I do hope you’re not thinking of getting married?’

‘We, my dear Mildred, are the observers of life. Let other people get married by all means, the more the merrier.’

On the bus I began thinking that William had been right and I was annoyed to have to admit it. Mimosa did lose its first freshness too quickly to be worth buying

and I must not allow myself to have feelings, but must only observe the effects of other people’s.

I was a little dismayed, as we often are when our offers of help are taken at their face value,

It was depressing the way the same old things turned up every week. Just the kind of underclothes a person like me might wear, I thought dejectedly, so there is no need to describe them.

Love was rather a terrible thing, I decided next morning, remembering the undercurrents of the evening before. Not perhaps my cup of tea.

It was a kind of fiction that we had always kept up, this not knowing anyone at the moment that we wanted to marry, as if there had been in the past and would be in the future.

I wondered that she should waste so much energy fighting over a little matter like wearing hats in chapel, but then I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us—the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.

Curried whale, goodness, you wouldn’t feel like having that for tea, would you? I had an argument about it the other day with Protheroe—you know how strictly she keeps Lent and all that sort of nonsense—well, there she was eating whale meat thinking it was fish!’ ‘Well, isn’t it?’ ‘No, of course it isn’t. The whale is a mammal,’ said Dora in a loud truculent tone. ‘So you see it can hardly count as fish.’

We’ve had a lucky escape, if you ask me.’ A lucky escape? I thought sadly. But would we have escaped, any of us, if we had been given the opportunity to do otherwise? ‘Perhaps it’s better to be unhappy than not to feel anything at all,’ I said.

‘Oh, I’m always free,’ I said unguardedly.

‘Thank you, but I think I will have Hawaiian Fire,’ I said obstinately, savouring the ludicrous words and the full depths of my shame.

‘Yes! In the sea of life enisled,

With echoing straits between us thrown,

Dotting the shoreless watery wild,

We mortal millions live ALONE,’

My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the ‘stream of consciousness’ type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.

‘It’s not natural for a woman to live alone, without a husband.’

‘No, perhaps not, but many women do and some have no choice in the matter.’

‘You put yourself too much in other people’s places,’ said Helena. ‘I believe she is quite happy pottering about her garden and reading novels. To be free and independent, that’s the thing.’

As for ‘egg poacher?’—that was an unfulfilled dream or ambition to buy one of those utensils that produce a neat artificial-looking poached egg. But I had never bought it and it seemed likely that on the rare occasions when I had a fresh egg to poach I should continue to delve for it in the bubbling water where the white separated from the yolk and waved about like a sea anemone.

I felt that I needed to get away from all the problems—mostly other people’s—with which I had been worried in the last few months.

‘The difficulty is finding a suitable person.’

‘Perhaps one shouldn’t try to find people deliberately like that,’ I suggested. ‘I mean, not set out to look for somebody to marry as if you were going to buy a saucepan or a casserole.’

‘You could consider marrying an excellent woman?’ I asked in amazement. ‘But they are not for marrying.’

‘You’re surely not suggesting that they are for the other things?’ he said, smiling.

That had certainly not occurred to me and I was annoyed to find myself embarrassed. ‘They are for being unmarried,’ I said, ‘and by that I mean a positive rather than a negative state.’

I was so astonished that I could think of nothing to say, but wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramatic occasion.

The truth was, I thought, looking once more at the letter on my desk which could not now be finished tonight, that I was exhausted with bearing other people’s burdens, or burthens as the nobler language of our great hymn-writers put it. Then, too, I had become selfish and set in my ways and would surely be a difficult person to live with.

There can be no exchange of glances over the telephone, no breaking into laughter.

‘These are for you,’ he said, thrusting them at me. I saw that the stems had been broken very roughly and that they were not tied together at all. ‘Are they out of your garden?’ I asked. ‘Yes; I snatched them as I was hurrying for the train.’ Somehow they seemed a little less desirable now. He had not chosen them, had not gone into a shop for that purpose, they had just happened to be there. If he had gone into a shop and chosen them . . . I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyse the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all. ‘Helena said that I must bring you some flowers and these happened to be in the garden,’ he went on, leaving me in no doubt at all.

Perhaps I did love it as I always seemed to get involved in them, I thought with resignation;

perhaps I really enjoyed other people’s lives more than my own.

He began pacing round the room, touching the bare walls and looking out of the uncurtained windows. ‘I wonder who will be sitting in this room a month from tonight?’ he mused. ‘I wonder if they will feel any kind of atmosphere? Should we carve our names in some secret place?

One longs to have a bit of immortality somewhere.’

‘What will you do after we’ve gone?’ Helena asked.

‘Well, she had a life before we came,’ Rocky reminded her.

‘Very much so—what is known as a full life, with clergymen and jumble sales and church services and good works.’

‘I thought that was the kind of life led by women who didn’t have a full life in the accepted sense,’ said Helena.

it seemed as if I might be going to have what Helena called ‘a full life’ after all.