Jane and Prudence

by Barbara Pym

‘I like to look in at these affairs,’ said Fabian. ‘One has a certain responsibility, living in a small community.’

We talked about Italy and Coventry Patmore and Donne and various other things.’

‘Coventry Patmore and Donne! He has never talked like that to me—you must have got on well.’ ‘I thought him rather pleasant,’ said Prudence in an offhand way. Really, now she came to think of it, though, it was she who had brought Coventry Patmore and Donne into the conversation.

I wonder if he kissed her, Jane thought. She was surprised to hear that they had had what seemed to be quite an intelligent conversation, for she had never found Fabian very much good in that line. She had a theory that this was why he tended to make love to women—because he couldn’t really thi...

Jane stood up and stretched her arms. She hoped it had been a good evening. Perhaps Fabian and Prudence could meet in London. She began to plan lunches and dinners for them. Really, she was almost like Pandarus, she told herself, only it was to be a courtship and marriage according to the most decorous conventions. Fabian was a widower and Prudence was a spinster; there wasn’t even the embarrassment of divorce. No, when she thought it over, Jane decided that she was really much more like Emma Woodhouse.

Jane Austen, Emma

Prudence wondered what things. Men did not have quite the same trials as women—it would be the larger things that worried him, his health, his work, perhaps even his wife Lucy. Was she being unsatisfactory in some way? Prudence felt that she could hardly ask.

Prudence took a larger gulp of her drink. She had thought his words rather banal, disappointing, even. Her imaginary evenings with Arthur Grampian had not been quite like this, but probably he would have been just as dull when it came to the point. Perhaps nothing could be quite so sweet as the imagined evenings with their flow of sparkling conversation, but it was not the kind of thing she could very well say to Fabian. All the same, she told herself sensibly, he would probably make quite a good husband for her. He was the right age, they had tastes in common and she enjoyed his company. Also, and this was not unimportant, he was good-looking. They would make a handsome couple.

‘Yes; dear Jane. She is rather wonderful, and yet in a way she’s missed something. Life hasn’t turned out quite as she meant it to.’ Fabian looked blank.

‘She seems quite happy,’ he ventured. ‘Seems, well, yes…’ Fabian found Prudence’s tone disconcerting; it was as if no woman could be really happy even when she was being taken out to dinner. He felt he ought to say something profound, but, naturally enough, nothing profound came out. ‘I mean, she leads a useful kind of life—work in the parish and that kind of thing,’ he went on vaguely. ‘But she’s really no good at parish work—she’s wasted in that kind of life. She has great gifts, you know. She could have written books.’ ‘Written books? Oh, good heavens!’

‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ asked Prudence rather sharply. ‘I always think women who write books sound rather formidable.’ ‘You’d prefer them to be stupid and feminine? To think men are wonderful?’ ‘Well, every man likes to be thought wonderful. A woman need not necessarily be stupid to admire a man.’ Prudence thought a little sadly of her admiration for Arthur Grampian, now perhaps in the past. She could not pretend that she really admired Fabian in quite the sam...

coffee and brandy she felt that perhaps she really did admire Fabian. After all, what was a brilliant mind and some rather dull books that nobody could be expected to read? Not so very much really when...

Somehow one did not play fast and loose with the friend of one’s vicar’s wife, he thought solemnly.

Going home by herself in the taxi, Prudence thought of Eleanor and her other contemporaries at Oxford, all neatly labelled in Miss Birkinshaw’s comfortable classification. ‘Eleanor, with her work at the Ministry, Mollie with the Settlement and her dogs, and Prudence…’ Well, what about Prudence? Prudence with her love affairs, that was what Jane used to say, and perhaps, after all, it was true. She would put the red roses in a glass on her bedside table and take them into the office in the morning.

‘Perhaps there should be a married lady, though. He might have asked you, but I told Mrs. Arkright, I didn’t think you would be much of a one for tidying.’

Jane hung her head. ‘No, not for tidying, perhaps,’ she agreed. But was her status as wife of the vicar of the parish to count for nothing? She could hardly add that her insatiable curiosity might also render her eligible for the position. ‘When are they going to do it?’

‘These were her books?’ Jane asked, going over to a small bookcase which was fixed on to the wall near the bed. ‘I suppose so,’ said Jessie, ‘though Constance didn’t seem to be much of a reader. She had a novel from the library sometimes.’ ‘Or a good biography,’ added Miss Doggett.

‘You mean a life of Florence Nightingale or the memoirs of some Edwardian diplomat’s widow,’ Jane murmured. ‘But these are mostly books of poetry. Was this what she read secretly, I wonder?’ ‘Oh, I don’t think Constance was the kind of person to go in for that

sort of thing,’ said Miss Doggett in a ...

‘People do seem to be ashamed of admitting that they read poetry,’ said Jane, ‘unless they have a degree in English—it is permissible then. It has become a kind of bad habit, but one that is excused. I wonder what she made of Mr. Auden and Mr. MacNeice? Perhaps the seventeenth century was more to her taste, as it is to mine. Odd to think that we may have had that in common.’ She took a book from the shelf and began to examine it in the hope of finding an interesting inscription on the fly-leaf. Nor was she disappointed, for on it was...

She closed the book quickly and slipped it into the canvas hold-all. This must not go to the jumble sale. Marvell—A Definition of Love—had poor Constance’s love been begotten by Despair upon Impossibility? Jane wondered. But then of course when writing an inscription one did not always consider the appropriateness or otherwise of the rest of the poem. 1935—Fabian would have been in his early twenties and Constance some years older—it must have been at some moment during their courtship. Jane wondered when she had taken her gift back, if it had been a conscious action performed on some special occasion, perhaps after some particularly painful infidelity on Fabian’s part, or whether the book had just got into the shelf of its own accord, as it were, as books do when they are no longer particularly treasured.

The Definition of Love My love is of a birth as rare As ’tis for object strange and high; It was begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility. Magnanimous Despair alone Could show me so divine a thing Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown, But vainly flapp’d its tinsel wing. And yet I quickly might arrive Where my extended soul is fixt, But Fate does iron wedges drive, And always crowds itself betwixt. For Fate with jealous eye does see Two perfect loves, nor lets them close; Their union would her ruin be, And her tyrannic pow’r depose. And therefore her decrees of steel Us as the distant poles have plac’d, (Though love’s whole world on us doth wheel) Not by themselves to be embrac’d; Unless the giddy heaven fall, And earth some new convulsion tear; And, us to join, the world should all Be cramp’d into a planisphere. As lines, so loves oblique may well Themselves in every angle greet; But ours so truly parallel, Though infinite, can never meet. Therefore the love which us doth bind, But Fate so enviously debars, Is the conjunction of the mind, And opposition of the stars. —Andrew Marvell https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44679 https://interestingliterature.com/2016/08/01/a-short-analysis-of-andrew-marvells-the-definition-of-love/

‘Do you suppose he really wants any of these books?’ she asked in a rather rough tone. ‘Well, perhaps we had better ask him,’ said Miss Doggett, ‘though he did say he’d rather we used our own judgment.’

‘Mrs. Cleveland wants to know about the books,’ she began. ‘What books?’ ‘On the shelf by the bed.’

‘Oh, let her do what she likes with them—take them herself or have them for a jumble sale—I don’t care.’

‘Poor Fabian. What are you doing?’ Jessie laid a hand on his head and looked down into his face. ‘Just brooding?’ ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said....

‘Yes, you are having the pain now,’ Jessie said. ‘Women are very powerful—perhaps they are always triumphant in the end.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Oh, you wouldn’t understand!’ She d...

He began to think about Jessie Morrow—more in her than met the eye—a deep one—his thoughts shaped themselves into conventional phrases. She had an unexpectedly sharp tongue; there was something a little uncomfortable about that. She was so badly dressed, usually in tweeds that had

never been good. It would be interesting to see her transformed in the way that the women’s magazines sometimes glamorised a dowdy woman. No doubt Prudence would be able to make some suggestions….Fabian’s thoughts now turned to her, but his evenings in her company, though delightful, seemed to have little reality at the moment. Wine, good food, flowers, soft lights, holding hands, sparkling eyes, kisses…and upstairs those three women were sorting out poor Constance’s things. Altogether he was glad when Mrs. Arkright announced that she had laid tea in the dining-room.

Still, she had perhaps done some good by saving poor Constance’s gift from prying eyes, and she had certainly collected a lot of useful jumble.

Jane was thinking too much about Constance and the book, Jessie about Fabian, and Fabian himself about the oppressive presence of three not particularly attractive women at his table, and also about Jessie’s strange behaviour earlier in the afternoon. He hoped she wasn’t going to become a nuisance in any way. They still had a little more sorting out to do, but he decided against offering them sherry when they had finished. It might go to their heads, he decided, and then they might all behave foolishly. He could easily make it understood that he was really too much upset to prolong the painful business any longer. He would have a half bottle of St. Emilion with his dinner, and after that he might

write a letter to Prudence.

She wandered away in the direction of the vicarage, but when she reached the church she lingered a while by the churchyard wall, thinking of eighteenth-century poets and charnel-houses and exhumations by the light of flickering candles.

Jane felt like some character in a novel by Mrs. Henry Wood.

Ellen Wood, was an English novelist, better known in that respect as Mrs. Henry Wood. She is remembered most for her 1861 novel East Lynne, but many of her books became international bestsellers and widely known in the United States. See also http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/authors/wood/index.html

Really, thought Jane, it was like one of those rather tedious comic scenes in Shakespeare—Dogberry and Verges, perhaps—and therefore beyond her comprehension. She suddenly saw them all in Elizabethan costume and began to smile.

the episode in the choir vestry.

IN HER EARLY DAYS Jane had once had a book of essays published and had somehow managed to become a member of a certain literary society of which she still sometimes attended meetings.

This particular meeting was to be a rather special one; it was the centenary of the birth of an author whose works Jane had never read, but who had died recently enough to be remembered by many persons still alive. This seemed a good reason for a literary society to be gathering together, as Jane explained to Nicholas, who had protested, though mildly enough, at her missing a meeting of the Parochial Church Council.

remembering her intrusion into the choir vestry a few weeks ago of which she had told him nothing.

‘I should have thought the time could be more profitably spent in encouraging young authors rather than in celebrating dead ones,’ Nicholas declared. ‘But it does encourage them,’ Jane said. ‘They imagine that one day such a meeting might be held about them, and I suppose they

Nicholas sighed and did not argue further, for he knew it was likely to be as profitable as most arguments with his wife. His poor Jane, he must let her go where she wanted to.

Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.

Barbara Bird (‘Miss Bird has her novels and her dogs,’ as Miss Birkinshaw put it),

Here again, as when she went back to her old College, she found that she did not really look any more peculiar than the majority of the women present, most of whom were dressed without regard to any particular fashion.

Miss Bird then went on to tell Jane about what the critics had said about her latest novel, during which Jane’s thoughts wandered, ‘much incident and little wit’ she heard dimly,

To-night there were three speakers, an elderly female novelist, a distinguished critic and a beautiful young poet.

‘Oh, they’re nothing, really,’ said the young woman. ‘One’s first two books are really rather more than that,’ said Miss Bird. ‘After the first two or three one must be unselfish and consider one’s public and one’s publisher. I have just finished my seventeenth—“

Miss Bird’s readers know what to

expect now and they will not be di...

It was nothing you could possibly have read,’ she went on hastily, seeing the puzzled look on the woman’s face. ‘A book of essays on seventeenth-century poets about fifteen years ago.

The kind of book you might put in the bathroom if you have books there—with Aubrey’s Brief Lives, and Wild Wales—

But once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.