Jane and Prudence, Barbara Pym
Jane and Prudence, Barbara Pym
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Jane and Prudence
A Novel

Author: Barbara Pym

Narrator: Mary Sarah

Unabridged: 7 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/23/2020

Categories: Fiction, Family Life


Synopsis

The author of Excellent Women explores female friendship and the quiet yearnings of British middle-class life—a literary delight for fans of Jane Austen.

Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates were close friends at Oxford University, but now live very different lives. Forty-one-year-old Jane lives in the country, is married to a vicar, has a daughter she adores, and lives a very proper life in a very proper English parish. Prudence, a year shy of thirty, lives in London, has an office job, and is self-sufficient and fiercely independent—until Jane decides her friend should be married. Jane has the perfect husband in mind for her former pupil: a widower named Fabian Driver.

But there are other women vying for Fabian's attention. And Pru is nursing her own highly inappropriate desire for her older, married, and seemingly oblivious employer, Dr. Grampian. What follows is a witty, delightful, trenchant story of manners, morals, family, and female bonding that redefines the social novel for a new generation.

About Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym (1913-1980) was a bestselling and award-winning English novelist. Her first book, Some Tame Gazelle, launched her career as a writer beloved for her social comedies of class and manners. Pym is the only author to be named twice in a Times Literary Supplement list of "the most underrated novelists of the century." She produced thirteen novels, the last three published posthumously. Her 1977 novel Quartet in Autumn was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Fiona on March 25, 2019

Another hilarious and satirical look at Barbara Pym’s world. It reminds me so much of Wodehouse, dated and quaint yet somehow a world I wish we could all still inhabit. Where a relationship was broken by a letter, where a meal out with a man caused serious gossip for villagers, where a woman’s unmar......more

Goodreads review by Magrat on November 21, 2022

De las novelas más divertidas que he leído de la Pym. Sencilla y ligera, cuenta una vez más esa vida en un pueblecillo, las historias de vecinos, los secretos y escarceos amorosos, y todo lo hace con esa habilidad de esta autora para calar a las personas y reírse de ellas pero siempre con elegancia.......more

Goodreads review by La pecera de Raquel on January 14, 2023

Comedia cozy divertidísima con salseo incluido, muy recomendable. 🌺 Ambientada entre Londres y un pequeño pueblo de la campiña inglesa a mediados de los 50. Por un lado tenemos a Jane de unos 40 años, esposa de un vicario que es trasladado de parroquia, y madre de una hija adolescente. Y por otro lad......more

Goodreads review by Lark on September 16, 2019

The bio of Pym on the back of my copy of Jane and Prudence accuses her of writing primarily about "Anglican spinsters." The phrase itself seems like it's from another age, and so does Pym's novel about middle class British women making their way through the immediate postwar years. Pym's women are i......more