Jane and Prudence
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Jane and Prudence is a novel by Barbara Pym, first published in 1953 and according to the novelist Jilly Cooper her finest work “ full of wit, plotting, characterization and miraculous observation"[2]
[edit] Plot summary
Jane, a vicar's wife, lives a very different kind of life from her friend, the single and independent Prudence. The book details the period in Nicholas and Jane’s life when they take over a new parish in an (anonymous) English village and encounter the widower Fabian Driver, who Jane decides will make an excellent husband for Prudence.[3] Prudence has an imponderable attraction to her older and completely impervious employer, the head of an unspecified academic foundation. There is, however, competition for Fabian - Miss Morrow, another spinster in the parish who seeks escape from her low-paid job as a companion to the domineering Miss Doggett.
[edit] Characters
- Jane a good hearted Vicar’s wife in her 40th year
- Nicholas, her mild mannered husband
- Flora, their despairing teenage daughter
- Prudence 29 a beautiful and elegant spinster[4]
- Fabian, a vain and self-obsessed widower
- Miss Doggett, a tyrannical old lady
- Miss Morrow, her outwardly meek but calculating companion[5]
- ^ Reprinted by Virago Press on 6th December 2007
- ^ If you want a great read Barbara Pym will fix it- article in "Seven" p3, Sunday Telegraph Issue 2,425 (dated 3 December 2007)
- ^ For an evaluation of this setting see Chapter 4 Jane and Prudence in "Reading Barbara Pym" Donato,D. Ch 4 pp81-101 Maddison, N.J Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003 ISBN 0838640958
- ^ A good analysis of her inner qualities is found in Barbara Pym and Anthony Trollope: Communities of Imaginative Participation Heberlein,K.B in "Pacific Coast Philology", Vol. 19, No. 1/2 (Nov., 1984), pp. 95-100
- ^ These last two characters resurface in Crampton Hodnet where they are ensconced in academic Oxford-article The importance of literature in the novels of Barbara Pym Ackley,K.A pp33-46 in "All this reading: the literary world of Barbara Pym" Lenckos,F.E./. Miller,E.J.(Ed) Maddison, N.J Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003 ISBN 0838639569
[edit] External links
