Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym
published 1953
[excerpt]
Prudence looks lovely this
evening, thought Jane, like somebody in
a woman's magazine, carefully ‘groomed’, and wearing a red dress that sets
off her pale skin and dark hair. It was odd, really, that she should not yet have
married. One wondered if it was really better to have loved and lost than never
to have loved at all, when poor Prudence seemed to have lost so many times. For
although she had been, and still was, very much admired, she had got into the
way of preferring unsatisfactory love affairs to any others, so that
it was becoming almost a bad habit.
comments: I think of this as a calming book: and also a charming one.
Jane and Prudence are two old friends: Jane is a few years older, and married
to a vicar, with a grown-up daughter Flora. Prudence is very attractive and
clever, but - as above - has never married any of her many boyfriends, and is
something of what was then called a ‘career girl’. She has a crush on her boss,
the awful Dr Grampian, whom she helps with his work.
Jane and her husband Nicholas are just taking over a new
Parish, and Prudence comes to visit and gets involved in various aspects of country
life, as well as meeting an eligible widower Fabian – whom the reader can see
would be just as bad a choice as Dr G.
So lots of low-stakes enjoyment here. Jane is not a natural
clergy wife and doesn’t seem to have the clothes, the flower-arranging
ability, or the social small talk for the job. But she enjoys life, thinking
her thoughts and watching the congregation.
Prudence lives the London life in her elegant flat, eating
out and judging restaurants and their clientele.
The book starts, above, at a reunion in the Oxford college
that both women attended, and this was a happy chance for me because I have lately
been at the Barbara
Pym Society conference at St Hilda’s College Oxford…
And in my talk there I mentioned that
Miss Doggett in Jane and Prudence is grandly dressed wearing
‘a large hat of the type known as ‘matron’s’, trimmed with brown velvet and
little tufts of feathers.’
- And
that there had been a whole long
discussion of these matron
hats on my blog.
Poor Jane has terrible clothes:
It was difficult to say
whether the garments she now appeared in were any more suitable for the
occasion than those she had been wearing before. Her dress, a patterned navy
foulard with long sleeves, was really too light for October and was a little
crushed, for, as Flora rightly guessed, it had been put.away in a drawer since
the last warm weather. She had also taken the trouble to change into silk
stockings and a pair of very uncomfortable-looking navy shoes with pointed toes
and high heels. Her face had been hastily dabbed with powder of rather too
light a shade.
Prudence has a red velvet housecoat. ‘Had she entertained Fabian
in her red velvet dressing-gown?’ Jane wondered. (No, is the answer)
Jane and Prudence seems to me to show two sides of Barbara Pym – is it too strong to suggest that the two women represent the different directions she might have gone in, the two sides of her character? She never was a clergy wife, but she obviously played with the idea a lot. And she was a woman-about-town, a woman with a job, but not quite to the same extent as Prudence.
Prudence – Miss Bates – turns up rather unnervingly in A
Glass of Blessings, though only glimpsed round the edges: Wilmet’s husband
Rodney, whom she tends to take for granted, is having lunches with Prudence on
the downlow. A Glass is 5 years after J&P and in all honesty most
readers would be hoping Prudence was happily married by then….
Jane’s printed dress clover vintage
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