Barbara Pym is a neglected novelist who, after a long period of enforced silence, has recently published a bitterly amused account of decaying Englishness [Quartet in Autumn]. And although Lord David Cecil has called Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings "the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past 75 years", their comic vision is elegantly grey rather than "high"—unless that adjective refers to their type of Anglicanism. They define a spinsterly purgatory where characters with names like Rowena, Sir Denbigh Grote, Reresby-Hamilton, engage in politely meaningless conversations in a vanished world of trolley buses, Hillman Huskies and impoverished Anglo-Catholic gentlewomen. They attend moth-eaten jumble sales in draughty parish halls, sip weak China tea and read The Church Times and Crockford's Clerical Gazette. Meek spinsters imagine romance with an archdeacon among "chipped Della Robbia plaques, the hissing of gas fires and tea...