jane and prudence, by barbara pym
This is a lot of people’s favourite Pym novel, including Jilly Cooper’s and Pym’s herself. Maybe that’s because it is in part a retelling of Emma, one of Austen’s most charming books. As well as shuffling her own deck of archetypes, Pym has shuffled in several from Austen’s pack.
Prudence disliked being called ‘Miss Bates’; if she resembled any character in fiction, it was certainly not poor silly Miss Bates.
No, when she thought it over, Jane decided that she was really much more like Emma Woodhouse.
The romantic stranger is the widower Fabian Driver, who was serially unfaithful to his dead wife Constance (ouch.) The clergyman is married again, but Jane, his wife, is neither fish nor fowl: too ineffectual to be a helpmeet like Agatha Hoccleve, too lazy to be a thinker like Helena Napier. In her notes on the novel, Pym’s thumbnail sketch of Jane is devastating in its cruelty:
The wife sits on committees. Is literary, but no time for that now – perhaps had even wanted to do research (‘The influence of Somebody on Something’). Missed opportunities. Jane felt she has not been really successful – but a happy marriage and a child, people might say rather reproachfully, wasn’t that something?
And yet readers love Jane, and for good reason. Like the children of Elfine Starkadder and Richard Hawk-Monitor, she blazes with poetry in her soul. Her well-intentioned but blundering efforts to hook Prudence up are, like Emma Woodhouse’s, not punished with success. Only one marriage proposal is accepted in this book, and it is heartily regretted by almost all concerned.
Cameos: Dora’s awful brother William interrupts Prudence and Geoffrey to warn them against ordering the pate. We are given tragic news about Mildred Lathbury.
