Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym

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….

There are more clothes issues in J&P, so there will be more posts. I can't believe I haven't tackled this book before on the blog... 

Jane’s printed dress clover vintage