Really funny and clever; particularly re: Anglo-Catholic social culture. It sometimes managed to feel a little gruesome, just from the sheer claustrophobic press of expectations and under-estimations one can feel around the narrator at all times, which was impressive if difficult to experience at times. I want Mildred Lathbury to never have to cook for a man who doesn't know the first thing about her ever again! ( )

Simply a wonderful read. ( )

excellent! jumble sales, endless cups of tea, that cursed incense (whether the good type or no), the meaning behind a quick glance- oh my. such minuscule things, stirred and expanded to take over all of our narrator’s tiny universe. The minutia of a quiet spinster’s life, the strictures of lower middle class post WW2 church-centric society, observed by a witty, dark intelligence with an extraordinary subtlety and an occasional giggle.

‘Well, you’re a sensible person. it’s just the kind of thing you would have.’
Oh, dear, one was to be for ever cast down, I thought, brooding over the piece of fish on my plate….

haha! If you like the Penelopes, Muriel Spark or Nancy Mitford you will thoroughly enjoy this gem. ( )

Needed a break after reading a string of YA dystopians for work. This book is certainly the polar opposite of a YA dystopian, and it's a classic of humorous 20th-century British fiction for a reason.

Excellent Women is a comedy of manners—except that the setting is bleak post-War London, and it's a black comedy. This book is kind of like the anti-chick lit novel, with the quaint job (instead of a cupcake shop, a Society for the Care of Aged Gentlewomen) and the cast of baffling, unreliable men.

It's not laugh-out loud funny, but is nevertheless hilarious; Mildred's voice gives everything a tragic (but restrained) humor. And while many of the supporting characters have the two-dimensional quality you see in satire, Mildred is a complex, fully realized character and the reason I kept turning the pages.

Some books succeed by stringing together well-written scenes, but Excellent Women succeeds as a beautifully orchestrated whole, with impeccable comic pacing.

I hope I am not overselling this book—to enjoy it, you have to be the kind of person who enjoys reading about a vicar's daughter making tea and organizing jumble sales for 270 pages. I just happen to be that person. ( )

Mildred is a very naive, sheltered, closed-minded woman with no more than a high-school education. She works in an agency that takes care in some way of ageing upper-middleclass women who live alone. She is also very involved with her local Anglican church. When a more educated, experienced couple moves into the flat below hers, she is confronted with experiences she is not ready for. All of a sudden everyone she knows is trying to find her a husband or somehow broaden her horizons, or both. While their manner is generally insulting and patronizing, she is not exactly comfortable with her status either.
Women like Mildred in real life drive me nuts, but this was a well-written book. I hated Mildred for most of the book, and was annoyed that she is the narrator and tells the story from her very immature perspective. I just finished a Sayers book about Lord Peter Wimsey, and several Wodehouse books about Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, so the snooty classist society setting was familiar enough, but I found it interesting how much the women in this novel limit themselves and each other even when the men around them are hoping they might break some of the more old-fashioned and silly social rules. I am so glad I did not grow up in such a community. ( )