Jane and Prudence

by Barbara Pym

Prudence Bates was twenty-nine, an age that is often rather desperate for a woman who has not yet married. Jane Cleveland was forty-one, an age that may bring with it compensations unsuspected by the anxious woman of twenty-nine.

the announcement in the Chronicle under Marriages,

‘Jane Mowbray Bold to Herbert Nicholas Cleveland.’

‘To Jane Cleveland (Bold), a daughter (Flora Mowbray)’.

Nic...

Trollope

Church Times.

Miss Charlotte M. Yonge.

Chronicle.

woman’s magazine,

cocoa or Ovaltine

cigarettes

hot d...

‘I’m a sort of personal assistant to Dr. Grampian,’ said Prudence.

Dr. Grampian was some kind of an economist or historian, she believed. He wrote the kind of books that nobody could be expected to read.

Donne,

the poet John Cleveland?

John Cleveland https://www.poemhunter.com/john-cleveland/biography/

Miss Birkinshaw

Donne, Marvell and Carew.

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44688

seventeenth-century metaphysical poets

And Prudence’s love for Arthur Grampian, or whatever one called it—perhaps love was too grand a name—just went hopelessly on while time slipped away….

Church Times.

Hugh Walpole,’

Hugh Walpole https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Walpole

‘And we are to have your daughter Flora with us, next term,’ said Miss Birkinshaw. ‘I always like to see the children coming along.’ ‘Ah, yes; I shall live my own

Oxford days over again with her,’ sighed Jane.

Jane ran to her window and looked out at the river and a tower dimly visible through the trees. She had been given the room she had occupied in her third year and the view was full of memories.

Nicholas

Prudence had her memories too. Laurence and Henry and Philip, so many of them, for she had had numerous admirers,

A widower, that was what was needed if such a one could be found. A widower would do splendidly for Prudence.

Arthurs

Knights of the Round Table

‘It isn’t so much what there is between us as what there isn’t,’ Prudence was saying; ‘it’s the negative relationship that’s so hurtful, the complete lack of rapport, if you see what I mean.’

Not agriculture then, but a widower, that was how it would have to be.

‘That only happens in the works of your favourite novelist,’ said her husband indulgently, for his wife was a great novel reader, perhaps too much so for a vicar’s wife.

Lomax

Will he be bringing Mrs. Lomax with him?’ ‘No, he is not married as far as I know,’ said Nicholas vaguely, ‘though it is some time since we’ve met. Our conversation yesterday was mostly about parish matters. I remember at Oxford he rather tended towards celibacy.’

She looked out over the laurels to the green-painted gate.

‘But there is somebody coming,’ exclaimed Nicholas in a rather agitated voice. ‘A lady, or perhaps a woman, in a straw hat with a bird on it, and she is carrying a bloodstained bundle.’

Mrs. Glaze.

Mrs. Pritchard

‘Canon Pritchard,’

parish magazine obituary notices,

Flora was just putting away the last of the china. She had not inherited her mother’s vagueness and looked very much like her father, tall and slim with blue eyes and dark smooth hair. She was eighteen and looking forward to going up to Oxford in the autumn.

‘Oh well,’ said Mrs. Glaze in an easy tone that promised much, ‘I’ve lived in this parish all my life. If Mr. Meadows, our curate, had been still here, he’d have been a great help to the vicar. But of course he left when Canon Pritchard did. He was married just before he went.’ ‘Married? Oh, how nice. Was his wife from this village?’

‘Has Mr. Lomax a curate?’ she asked at last. ‘Father Lomax, he calls himself,’ corrected Mrs. Glaze; ‘but of course he isn’t married. There’s no woman sets foot in that vicarage, except Mrs. Eade to clean, and the ladies of his parish, of course. No, madam, Father Lomax hasn’t got a curate.

Romish practices,

Mr. Edward Lyall,

Mr. Oliver

Mr. Mortlake and his friends, oh, they don’t like it, madam,