Excellent Women

Set in postwar London, the novel follows Mildred Lathbury, an unmarried clergyman's daughter in her early thirties who lives alone in a flat near Victoria Station. Mousy, plain, and self-deprecating, Mildred works part-time at an organization that helps impoverished gentlewomen. Her social life revolves around St. Mary's, her high-church Anglican parish, and the friendship of its vicar, Julian Malory, and his sister Winifred. It is a quiet existence shaped by parish duties and small domestic rituals.

Mildred's routine shifts when Helena Napier, a fair-haired, pretty anthropologist, moves into the flat below. Over tea, Helena reveals that her husband, Rockingham, is still serving as a naval officer in Italy and that she dreads his return. The two married impulsively during the war and have grown apart, especially since Helena began collaborating in Africa with Everard Bone, a fellow anthropologist Mildred glimpses on the stairs.

When a telegram announces Rocky's arrival, Helena is out. Rocky appears alone: dark, elegant, and effortlessly charming. He and Mildred talk easily over coffee until Helena returns with Everard and the four share an awkward bottle of wine. Rocky gives Mildred a little china goat, and she finds herself charmed despite recognizing that putting people at ease is simply what he does.

Meanwhile, Julian announces he has found a tenant for the vicarage's top-floor flat: Allegra Gray, a clergyman's widow with "such sad eyes." Mildred first sees Allegra walking and laughing with Julian and feels uneasy. She formally meets Mrs. Gray at the parish jumble sale and finds her good-looking, self-possessed, and armed with a secret smile.

Mildred's emotional life, though outwardly uneventful, grows more complicated. At her annual luncheon with William Caldicote, her friend Dora's brother, Mildred inadvertently admits that Rocky is the kind of person she would have liked for herself. William insists she must not marry, calling her "an excellent woman" and an "observer of life." One spring afternoon, Mildred and Rocky share mimosa and go out for tea. She finds herself laughing and feeling witty in his company, but afterward reminds herself of the Wren officers, the women of the Royal Navy's wartime service whom Rocky had charmed in Italy. During Dora's Easter visit, the two friends spot Julian holding Allegra's hand in deckchairs in the park. On the train home from their old school's memorial service, a former Wren officer reveals that Rocky was charming but shallow; the officers called themselves "the Playthings," taken up and put down at will.

Allegra's presence steadily reshapes the parish. At the flower decorating for Whitsunday, the Christian feast of Pentecost, she overrides Winifred's traditional altar arrangement. Julian's attention to Mrs. Gray becomes increasingly obvious. Mildred and Rocky attend the reading of Helena and Everard's paper at the Learned Society, and afterward Rocky jokes that Everard "might do very well for Mildred." She returns home feeling that love is "not perhaps my cup of tea."

The central revelation comes at a Soho lunch. Allegra announces that Julian has proposed. Her visible relief at Mildred's calm reaction exposes an assumption both she and Julian share: that Mildred was in love with him. Mildred insists plainly that she never was. Allegra then asks Mildred to take Winifred in after the marriage, observing that Mildred has "no other ties." Julian confirms the engagement, telling Mildred, "Dear Mildred, it would have been a fine thing if it could have been," and Mildred insists again that she was never in love with him.

Everard draws Mildred into his own difficulties. He confides that Helena has been visiting his flat late at night and has declared her love for him, which he does not return. He asks Mildred to "drop a hint" to Helena, treating her as "a sensible person, with no axe to grind." He then takes her to dinner at his mother's house. Mrs. Bone is eccentric, passionately concerned with the suppression of woodworm and with what she calls "the Dominion of the Birds," a collection of newspaper clippings about birds attacking people. Mildred copes competently, drawing on her lifetime of clerical social training, and Everard admires her skill.

Helena leaves Rocky after a quarrel sparked by her putting a hot saucepan on a polished walnut table. Rocky announces the separation with theatrical despair, and Mildred takes him upstairs and makes him lunch. Helena telephones from the flat of Miss Clovis, a staff member at the Learned Society, and asks Mildred to pack a suitcase and deliver it to Victoria Station. Rocky departs for his country cottage, leaving Mildred to supervise the furniture removal. Mrs. Morris, Mildred's cleaning woman, offers frank observations: The excellent women who do everything for men are not the ones who get married.

During a holiday with Dora in Devonshire, Mildred encounters Helena, who urges her to write to Rocky and bring about a reconciliation. Back in London, Mildred struggles over the letter but eventually sends it. At a lunch with Everard, she has the novel's defining exchange. When Everard says he wants to marry someone sensible, Mildred suggests someone like Miss Clovis. Everard calls Clovis "an excellent woman," and Mildred responds that excellent women "are not for marrying." Asked whether they are not allowed normal feelings, she replies, "Oh, yes, but nothing can be done about them." The conversation crystallizes the book's central irony: The competent, selfless women whom everyone depends on are precisely the ones whose own desires go unacknowledged.

The engagement between Julian and Allegra collapses suddenly. On a rainy September evening, Winifred appears at Mildred's door soaking wet and weeping, declaring she cannot stay in the house with "that woman" another minute. Allegra has been mocking Winifred's clothes, overriding her in household and church matters, and suggesting she move away. Julian arrives and announces flatly that the engagement is broken off. Mrs. Jubb, the vicarage housekeeper, reports that Mrs. Gray has left. Mildred settles Winifred in her spare room and reflects that she has grown exhausted with bearing other people's burdens.

Rocky appears unexpectedly with chrysanthemums. After receiving Mildred's letter, he wrote to Helena and they reconciled. They are leaving London to settle in the country. Rocky insists Mildred should marry Julian and says he still feels "we ought to do something" about finding her a partner. On their last evening, Rocky scratches lines from Dante on the windowpane, misspelling one word, and Helena urges Mildred to "look after poor Everard Bone."

New tenants move in downstairs: Miss Boniface and Miss Edgar, two former governesses who lived in Italy for many years. They discover the Dante lines on the window and are reverently delighted, though they notice the misspelling. Mildred spots Everard coming out of the Learned Society with Esther Clovis on his arm and feels low, but he catches up with her and they have lunch together.

Mildred dresses carefully for dinner at Everard's flat. Over coffee, he asks her to help correct proofs for his book and then to make the index. She agrees, seeing the work as a kind of burden but "perhaps because of being a burden, a pleasure." She reflects that she will also need to protect Julian from the women living in his house, and concludes that between her duty there "and the work I was going to do for Everard, it seemed as if I might be going to have what Helena called 'a full life' after all." The novel ends on this note of wintry comedy: Mildred's "full life" will consist of doing things for other people, as it always has, though there is a faint, ambiguous suggestion that something more may come of it.