The narrator [of "Excellent Women"] is Mildred, a spinster in her 30's, self-effacing and dowdy, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. Her outlets are going to church and her friendship with the vicar and his sister. She expects nothing much to happen to her, and indeed it does not; but she makes friends with people to whom things do happen, and is disturbed—just a little—by their emotions, and by the emotions they awaken in her. Miss Pym's technique for comic effect is to glide over the pain of big happenings and to make much of the disproportionate impact of tiny ones….

[Mildred] is one of the "excellent women," the "rejected ones," always reliable in a crisis but never themselves part of the action. One's only doubt about Mildred is why she is so dim, when, like her creator, she is also so observant and critical. Miss...